Of Being Woven

Anne Samat takes her audience on an unmapped journey to a world of whimsical intricacies through her extraordinary techniques of unexpected weavings.

- Sarah NH Vogeler

If a single-word choice is tasked to describe Anne Samat’s work, it would be an expression which does not sound even vaguely English: pulchritudinous. It is actually a fancy word for ‘beautiful’; but to sum up the artist’s tapestries as merely beautiful is a great injustice. Unforgivable. And so, pulchritudinous – a thing of heartbreaking, breathtaking beauty is the way to go.

Anne Samat has been in the art industry for two decades, but only in these recent years her works have become increasingly visible. She graduated from Malaysia’s Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) in the nineties, and her graduation thesis works immediately caught the eye of renowned glassmaker/ painter Raja Azhar of Artcase Gallery. He took her under his wing, and together they mounted several exhibitions. He taught her grit, he schooled her of the harsh realities of a life as an artist. She took it all in and bloomed, somewhat. But it wasn’t enough to sate her eternally famished spirit. Anne wanted to do more, Local collectors at the time were unsure of what to make of her work. It was craft they said, not art. They’re pretty, they mused, but it is not really art.