Sydney-based collage artist and designer Yeara Chaham asks whether a feeling from music can become an artwork, building a mixed media composition from scanned pearls, magazine fragments and cool blue tones to translate the particular atmosphere of Sade into something you can see.
The starting point was a question: can a feeling from music become an artwork? Yeara Chaham chose Sade as her subject because of the very particular balance her music holds: warm and intimate, but also distant and restrained at the same time. The challenge was to find a visual equivalent for that tension rather than an illustration of it.
The decision not to make a portrait was central to the whole approach.
“It’s not about showing what the music looks like,” Chaham says, “it’s about holding onto the feeling and finding a way to give it form.”
Fragments replace the full face, so the composition becomes about atmosphere rather than likeness. A hoop earring remains as a subtle reference, sitting within the work rather than anchoring it. The result is a piece that evokes a presence without defining it.
The materials were gathered from different contexts and timeframes: a magazine cut-out of lips touching a flower, blue tones taken from an Italian magazine, and scanned pearls from the jewellery Chaham makes herself, placed inside the flower. The pearls came from thinking about the word timeless, one of the guiding ideas throughout, alongside minimal, understated, grounded and honest. Each material decision was shaped by those words as much as by visual instinct. A direct reference to the song Lover’s Rock is built into the composition through spacing: the lyrics describe emotional distance while remaining connected, so Chaham separated the text and left space between elements so that the feeling of distance becomes something visible rather than described.
The contrast between cooler blue tones and warmer, more tactile elements carries the same tension as the music itself, between closeness and restraint.
“I’ve been exploring how to take things I love, whether it’s a clothing brand or piece of music,” she says, “and asking what that feeling would look like if it was hanging on a wall.”
The collage is the answer to that question, made from physical materials scanned and composed digitally, bringing together things from different moments into something that holds a single, sustained mood.
Yeara Chaham is a Sydney-based collage artist and designer with a background in fashion and editorial, including over four years at Vogue and GQ. Her practice explores how a brand, a piece of music, or a feeling might be translated into a visual form.
Sade collage, March 2026. Mixed media: magazine clippings, scanned pearls, digital composition.
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