PROFILE

ayman yossri daydban
senses of belonging

The early 1970s, in a small village near Abha, in south-western Saudi Arabia. A small boy plays in the garden outside his family's traditional mud house. Carefully gathering up lumps of clay-like soil from the banks of a nearby stream, he sculpts them with his hands to create different objects and shapes. What he makes reflects his surroundings and bonds him closely with the immediate landscape around him. Surrounded by playmates, the boy seems perfectly at home and in tune with his environment.

Yet the boy is not a Saudi. He is in fact Palestinian, born in Ramallah but prevented from returning there with his family following the 1967 Six-Day War. Ayman Yossri Daydban is the son of a schoolteacher, who has worked in Saudi Arabia for many years and is a respected member of the local community. "I felt very at home there," recalls Daydban almost 40 years later, as we sit chatting in a London hotel. "We were very integrated with the Saudis among whom we lived and always felt very welcome."

When the young Daydban was six years-old, the family moved to Jeddah. Big city life represented a dramatic change, but exposed them to art by the likes of Henry Moore, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder, whose sculptures were dotted along the city's famous corniche. Except that for Daydban and his two brothers, these monumental works of art were "simply objects around which we played. We had no idea what they actually were." At school, Daydban was keen on drawing and was encouraged...