



Breathe
Open
Skin
touch
Expand
Accumulate
Ripple





Rock
Water
Flow
Hover
Collapse
Levitate
Crystallise












Collapse
Escape
Allow
Hold
Liquidity
Globules
Iridescence



Break
Release
collapse
skin
multiply
Grief
Grief



Focus on land, material and identity.
Rupture and longing. Fragments of meaning or expression, reflecting the sum of parts into a new unit. Materials reseach, working through the lens of collapse and accumulation.
Looking for narratives expressed in material properties and our relationship to them. Breaking things down into parts, encouraging constraints and random factors, deconstructing, re-assembling, using errors, rules, serendipity, and the properties and behaviour of clay, water and stone.
Inetersted in personal narratives as well as collective narratives told through material, found in mythology, geography, repetition and maps.
contact
maiabeyrouti ( a ) gmail.com
instagram.com/maia.beyrouti
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.
This is my main interest in materials, the place where their physicality meets the abstract. Ceramic materials offer a perfect medium for this – they lend themselves effortlessly for both metaphor and metamorphosis. Metaphor, as in the ability to engage with the human mind in an abstract realm – imagination, symbolism, belief – and metamorphosis, which is then the physical properties; malleability and capacity to change with temperature.
I wonder what narratives are present within the material that have shaped my experience. In practical terms I look for and question concepts I discover in writings about climate change, outer space, nature and mythology. Narratives we use to dehumanize, legitimise, or empower and liberate. Scripts by which we live our lives. It is important to me that this isn’t a place I enter with intentions for answers or beneficial properties.
In the studio I scale further into the matter’s properties, to the particles and their chemistry. My interest in material research is to engage with how the material behaves, and what new narratives emerge. Collecting, creating and melting glazes and materials is a way to look at how matter expresses itself, a desire for the materials to be vocal in a way I maybe don’t understand, but can recognize. I ask myself, how do I engage with the blurriness without the end goal of clarification? I orchestrate setups where I have less control, an invitation for material to be revealed, and then often reassemble the parts into a sculpture where our conversation continues.
The idea in my work is then to not expose something definitive, but to break open with the material, to play around with its propositions and wonder about what can be expressed.
As I work, all of these maps are mirrors to something singular and nebulous which is a very restful and freeing experience to me. An absence of absolutes. The pieces are a combination of these aspects and the starting point can be anywhere on the scale.
So my work deals specifically with this property of origin, whether mine, ours, or the material’s, and where those overlap. This is my connection to clay.