The critical consensus on is still coalescing, but the trajectory is clear. Major critics like Jerry Saltz have called her “a poet of the fragment.” The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter, reviewing her Smithsonian show, wrote: “Lark achieves something rare: she makes absence visible. You do not look at her work and see what is missing. You look and feel what once was there, breathing.”
Her father, Brahim, was a shepherd who had lost half his flock to the great drought of ’16. He was a quiet man who expressed love through the careful trimming of his daughter’s hair with sheep shears, and through the silent offering of the best piece of bread from the tagine. He did not understand Aïcha’s larks, but he did not mock her either. When the other children called her crazy, Brahim would say, “My daughter hears God’s alarm clock. Leave her be.” aicha lark