Laila Hajibi

Visual artist based in Amman. She received her bachelor degree in Visual Arts – Painting and Drawing from the University of Jordan in 2019. She’s also been dancing both as a classic ballet and a contemporary dancer, which affected her early work as she started to combine drawing with movement.

Her current work is inspired from her journal and personal writings. “Writing was the only way for me to express myself before I was introduced to painting, and somehow my writings have always felt visual for me and I couldn’t express certain parts of them until I learned to replace my pen with a brush.”

Work Statement:

The Fragile Beauty of the Reef

In this series, I dive into the fragile beauty of coral reefs, a world both vibrant and fading. Through the eyes of a diver, I capture the striking contrast between the lush, thriving corals and their bleached, ghostly counterparts. These paintings explore the tension between life and loss, the awe-inspiring colors and shapes of healthy reefs against the haunting emptiness of their bleached remains. Each piece invites the viewer to experience the underwater world as a diver does with a sense of wonder, curiosity, and an urgent awareness of the environmental pressures threatening these ecosystems.
This series is a call to explore, appreciate, and protect the fragile beauty beneath the waves before it’s lost forever.