This Saudi Couple Creates Art Out of Nails, Coffee Beans & Rust

Saudi artists Hussain AlSadah and his wife Sahar AlOmair believe that there are many overlooked materials in our daily lives with tremendous potential for beauty. From the studio in their home, they’ve created artworks out of nails, pushpins, coffee beans, and screws in their dozens (if not hundreds) of thousands. They’ve also exhibited these works—always as a duo—in several galleries across Saudi Arabia, and built a following of collectors who often buy directly from them. But the couple don’t just create art together—they also met because of it.

“Art is what connected us from the very beginning,” Hussain AlSadah tells SceneNowSaudi over video call, with his wife Sahar and their infant daughter, Quds, by his side. A creative programme developer at the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (Ithra), Hussain met Sahar at an art workshop he was organi in 2021.

“Art didn’t just introduce us,” Sahar adds, “It let us understand each other without needing many words. What started with art became partnership, and love.” Though neither had formally studied art (they are both self-taught artists), they had been creating since they were young, with Sahar more focused on sketches and Hussain on digital art and woodworking. When they married a year later, creating art together became a natural process.

“We didn’t even discuss it,” says Hussain. “It just happened organically right from the start.” Hussain had a studio in his home that he used for art and carpentry, but when his wife moved in, he says she turned it into a ‘real’ studio. “The studio became more than just a workspace,” Sahar says. “It started to reflect both of our personalities and creative styles. We organized it in a way that felt warmer, more inspiring, and we added touches that represented us as a team.”

From that studio, one of the first artworks they produced together was Your Coffee Picker, a 2 by 1 metre artwork made with 13,000 discarded coffee beans. “I was working as a barista at the time, and sometimes the coffee we have gets burnt or doesn’t meet our standards.” Instead of throwing them away, Hussain began bringing the coffee beans home, where he and his wife roasted them to varying degrees to produce the different colours with which they could construct the piece. The process took two months.

“The work is based on a real photo from a Reuters article of a slave picking coffee at a planation in Brazil,” Hussain explains, adding how the piece was meant to highlight how famous brands use exploited labour in their products. This social messaging, which is present in much of the duo’s work, stems partially from Hussain’s academic background in journalism. Many of the issues the couple take up are also borne from conversations they find themselves having. “They are things that have affected us,” Hussain says, “and things that we think we should spotlight.”

By working so closely together in the studio, the couple have also gotten to better understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. According to Sahar, “We learned how to balance our different strengths, communicate better, and grow as both partners and artists.” Hussain feels similarly. “After a while you learn to respect that she’s better than you in some aspects, or I’m better than her in some aspects, and we follow each other’s lead.”

While Sahar is often the one responsible for sketching and conceptualising the work once they’ve established its core idea, Hussain is often more involved with picking the material and figuring out technical aspects related to bringing the piece to life. For example, in a work that involves more than 100,000 nails (as one of their pieces did), he figures out how dimensions of the nails like its thickness and the diameter of the nail head will affect the plywood base, or the spacing of each nail from each other. Though challenging, it’s part of the fun for the artist duo.

“My favorite artwork we worked on was the Holy House piece created using the Heavenly Titles [the 99 names of Allah],” Sahar tells us. “The whole experience felt special because we created it during winter, surrounded by such a calm and cozy atmosphere. We would spend hours working on it together with cups of tea, pieces of chocolate, and peaceful conversations in between. It became one of those memories that made us appreciate both the art and the process we shared together.”

Now, the couple is working on an entirely new medium together: rust. Hussain explains: “We live in Safwa in one of the big oases of the Kingdom, and there is a spring here called Darosh, named after the Persian King Darius. It’s been around for 2,000 years, but it receded 50 years ago.” According to Hussain, this has not just had an environmental impact, but also a cultural one. “My grandmother and my mother and I all know how to swim, but my younger sister can’t. It used to be so natural for us, and now we’re losing the identity of the area."

Petroleum extraction is likely the cause for the recession of the spring, and others like it. The spring, which Hussain estimates is about 30 meters across and lies less than a kilometre away from his house, has now been covered by corrugated zinc sheets, some of which have since rusted.

“We chose this material because what’s happening now, as a society, is that we cover these things and pretend they’re not there. As a society, we’re hiding the environment we’ve destroyed. This work is our way of saying don’t hide it.”