La reflexión de la materia

Reflections on my practice for infocerámica
Kindly translated into Spanish on their site by Wladimir Vivas 

As I was contemplating the invitation to write about my work for Info Ceramica, I saw an opportunity to unpack some thoughts around my relationship to the ceramic material. It feels like a challenge as it is a vast yet specific connection viewable through various lenses, the lenses themselves being under observation and part of the work. Here, I would like to talk mainly about my sculptural practice.

A central part of my work are the qualities of maps and territories (Cf. Korzybski “the map is not the territory”). I think using this as an analogy to look at how I engage with material works well as I relate with my practice on different levels, like an overlay of maps at various scales through which we can zoom in and out of.

On the personal scale, there is my individual relationship to clay. Parallel to that, I can zoom out and look at the larger collective entanglement with the material. I can zoom even further and consider outer space and the rich narratives about material physics and particles that inform how we navigate the world. From that point I can also zoom back in but away from the human this time, and into the material; the mountain, the cave, the brick, the soil, which my work also concerns itself with. This parallel zooming in and out movement is also circular, from human to ceramic and back again, as the material gives birth to archetypes in our psyche, in my psyche, and informs my relationship to clay.

So as an individual, ceramic is enmeshed with my personal identity, namely my longing for reconnecting with ancestral land and people. As a diaspora Palestinian clay has been a vector for reconnecting to soil and expressing this dispossession, with clay becoming a universal proxy. The very choice of working with clay has felt for me at its core like a constant re-enactement of this longing, no matter what I make.

There is also the idea of memory and my larger cultural identity. In that sense I have used the ceramic practice to make work that fills my need to find my way back to – biological and cultural – ancestors. I look at material as a door which could give me access, even if only remotely. Whilst this was tentative or symbolic at first, I realised the very act of searching and tip-toeing around my Palestinianess was my identity – the aspect of not being able to find the way in, or to inhabit it fully, defined my experience as a diaspora Palestinian for a long time. There is a compulsion to break open the material and to have it claim me back.

In my work I also zoom further out to a ceramic-human engagement that is anchored in material. Craft is a technology of time, of memory, of our capacity to store concepts in the ceramic material. Clay has properties of lending itself. The oldest piece of ceramic on record is a scultpure of a female figure, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, made 30,000 years ago. Whoever made it took a lump of clay and used its properties to create a portable item capable triggering thoughts, and I felt a need for engaging with this ability, to insert idea into material, and also to be able to extract it.

Using clay as storage is central in my work, both in the sense of the functional vessel, and in the abstract sense of imbuing objects with the symbolic. Using the vessel as a symbol for storage, I usually close the vessels I make with various slabs that stand on top of the opening. With these pieces I feel the close to clay and to a feeling for craft and memory. This obstruction is also an impulse to accumulate, to stack, to protect, to store for later and to remember. These are qualities I find inherent to the collective relationship to clay and that I want to be in conversations with.

Continuing to zoom out, I reach a blurrier map of archaic concepts where the material is entangled with the collective unconscious. Here I can freely engage with archetypes; the seed, the vessel, the cave, the extruded form. It feels like a forge, a primordial soup, and a place that doesn’t ask for answers. It is also here that I look at matter as a lens to view collective narratives at their source. I begin to cross a threshold where I can zoom back in through another door, moving from the human aspect to the material properties themselves.

Having changed scales from the individual to the collective to where we meet the abstract, I now start to zoom back in, into the clay matter. Like a human-to-clay gradient. And my work concerns itself very much with this because ultimately, an object takes form and this form is somewhat not up to me.