Between Craft and Art: Al-Sadu, a Heritage Textile Influencing the Saudi Contemporary Art

Al-Sadu craft represents a strategic element to realize identity in Saudi Arabia, and a source of inspiration, distinction, and artistic creativity. The relationship between inherited crafts and art is, in fact, an integrated relationship between the spiritual aspect of the artist linked to his identity, and the material aspect consisting of products and traditions. Due to the importance of this matter, interests and significant efforts of Saudi Arabia have increased in 2020 to develop inherited traditional crafts as part of the national heritage. The research problem has been crystallized as follows: Can we consider the inherited traditional Sadu craft an influential factor on the contemporary Saudi Plastic Art? The significance of emphasizing the artist's awareness in employing the inherited Sadu craft in Art. However, crafts, in their general sense, are divided into: Artistic, productive handcrafts, and inherited, traditional crafts. The artist's confused understanding of the general division of crafts may affect the balance of the intellectual context in contemporary Saudi art. The research aims to identify the importance of the Sadu textile as a traditional inherited national craft and its artistic concepts, in ad

dition to clarifying the importance of the relationship between traditional crafts and plastic art to find aesthetic and intellectual foundations that deepen the perspective of identity and achieve a balance between the inherited and the contemporary in Saudi Plastic Art (or: Fine Art).