Growing up between Jordan and Lebanon in the 1980s and ’90s, Dia Al Batal would often hear the repetitive “tick-tick-tick … tick-tick” of a hammer and chisel as her mother, Mona Saudi, worked for hours on her stone sculptures.
As an Arab female artist, the path for Saudi wasn’t easy. Al Batal said her mother was turned down by exhibitors in Europe and the United States multiple times.
The Jordanian sculptor died in 2022, but one of her abstract sculptures, called “Continuity,” was part of a recent exhibition at Christie’s auction house in London called Kawkaba (“constellation” in Arabic).
“This is how my mom
