Rethinking a textile appliqué tradition long associated with male tentmakers in Egypt, Amer masterfully pulls at the threads of cultural dualities—feminine and masculine, craft and art, abstraction and figuration—with sensitivity and specificity. Amer utilizes a traditional Egyptian textile craft in which richly colored appliqué panels were used to decorate the interiors of tents and pavilions. Here, Amer uses strips of cotton appliqué to "draw" an appropriated image of a woman from a pornographic magazine, imbuing it with a tenderness that defies its original context.

Through her artistic practice, Ghada Amer constantly aims to upend the traditional hierarchies of painting, and engage with the reorientation of the gaze through a feminist lens. She is greatly influenced by French feminist thinkers such as Helene Cixous, who wrote the famous 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” and advocated for women’s ability to create their own language and write about their own experience in order to transform themselves from object to subject.