layla Kassan
Bachelor of Arts in Fine arts
Michaelis School of Fine Art
Graduates: 2025
Specialisms: Printmaking / Fine Art / Painting
My location: Cape Town, South Africa
layla Kassan
First Name: layla
Last Name: Kassan
University / College: Michaelis School of Fine Art
Course / Program: Bachelor of Arts in Fine arts
Graduates: 2025
Specialisms: Printmaking / Fine Art / Painting
My Location: Cape Town, South Africa
About
Layla Kassan (b. 2003, East London, South Africa) is a visual artist in her final year of study at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Her practice engages themes of grief, memory, and explores how loss alters one’s relationship to home and belonging. A central material in her work is the marigold, a flower significant in Hindu mourning rituals, from which she extracts pigments to create organic watercolours. These handmade pigments are combined with fragmented transfers of family photographs, producing ghost-like images that hover between presence and absence. The unpredictability of these transfers mirrors the uncertainty of grief, while her use of negative space suggests rupture, longing, and the traces of what once was. Through these processes, Kassan constructs imagined spaces in which the corporeality of grief exists.
At 3am on the 3rd day of the 3rd month, I woke to the news of my father’s untimely passing. Returning home, I found a space once filled with love and warmth transformed by grief and funeral preparations. Without my father’s presence, I became homesick for a home that no longer felt the same. My body of work, ‘3am’ , explores how grief changes our perception of home. I use pigments that is handmade from marigold petals, a flower that is significant in Hindu mourning rituals, alongside fragmented family photographs. Through the process of printmaking image transfers a ghost-like images are infused in the hot-pressed watercolour paper. The clarity of the transfers is not controllable as some parts of the image comes out opaque, whereas other parts are more translucent. The unpredictability within the process reflects the uncertainty inherent within the grieving process. By combining these materials, I reconstruct fragments of memory and create a space in which the corporeality of my home lives.