Born in 1995, Kent, UK
Lives and works in Amman, Jordan
Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd is a visual artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, and textile-based media to explore desire, identity, and the poetics of intimacy. Working primarily on silk, Kydd engages the material as both subject and metaphor, a found vessel of migration, sensuality, and sacredness. His marks of paint and charcoal, soaked in oil, move across expanses of stitched silk panels staining the contours of luminous beloved forms: larger-than-life figures he refers to as “angel scale.”
Rooted in personal encounters, life drawing, and references to devotional imagery, Kydd’s figures move between the earthly and the cosmic. They emerge as apparitions; serene, haunted, and universal - anchored in a landscape inspired by the blossoming terrains of arid valleys and densely salted waters. These narrative scapes hold both melancholy and wonder, inviting the viewer into a world where intimacy becomes a form of reverence.
Kydd’s works intertwine materiality, heritage, and desire, drawing upon a nuanced gaze shaped by the histories of his mixed Iraqi-Scottish background. Whilst resisting over-determined readings, his practice instead honours feeling: tenderness expressed through gesture, devotion depicted in line, and memory embedded in fabric. Through this interplay of the sacred and the sensual, Kydd constructs emotive worlds that illuminate the complexity and vastness of human connection.