Lady Colleen

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Lady Colleen Heller on her time in Egypt:

​"The tribe I lived with was Al Naz’aina, a South Sinai Bedouin tribe of south Egypt on the west peninsula of the Sinai. When I lived there, it was stark and hot, really hot, and there’s no electricity, no running water, no food refrigeration. It’s survival, but also you find out who you are and who you are not. So it was very clear for me to find an expression of myself in the sands of time—the brown sands—and then on my camel I went over to this place called Malayhas. So, Malayhas is a natural oasis that is very small, and on your way down to it, from the compression of the earth and time, colors are there in the sands. So, there’s golds, and greens and blues and oranges and yellows and even like a silvery hue from the crystals. So we would draw in the sand, and we just left it because we couldn’t take it with us, and we had no phones to take pictures. And the wind would blow it away, and then the next month we’d go back to that area and we’d leave more signs. And so the inspiration for my art today is based on that fact that the colors are there. How we want to interpret them at the time, our emotional being at the time, and how we are as creative beings shows up when you’re stripped from everything you know to be true. That’s how I got to this today." 

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