As a creative practitioner I explore traditional methods of making such as, metalworking, blacksmithing, and woodworking. I am both a designer and a sculptor. Each discipline plays an integral role in my practice. The relationship between design aesthetics and sensibility should be harmonious to content while creating conceptual works. My designs remain separate from my sculptural work, however they exist as equal counterparts that inform one another.
I navigate through ideas of self-identification and mourning through the processing of materials. I attempt to reach an understanding of personal and cultural loss by using specific objects and materials. I am invested in exploring, researching, and experimenting with materials. This results in creating a ritual, and in confronting a viewer with objects alluding to posited scenarios. As a Palestinian American, I navigate the line between subtle and overt references to my heritage, religion, and what it means to be of both Western and Eastern cultures. In exploring this mode of thinking I began to attempt to capture the mourning of a conflict, and the duality of this cultural existence through the creation of an object. This cultural loss, and confusion expands borders, and affects a large group of a displaced people. Through this displacement comes a loss in a sense of true a cultural home. I facilitate a pseudo experience that conveys the process of this loss.
Through my work I mourn the loss of lives that I have not yet lost. Mourning the loss of life is a process that I believe is a constant. It is a means to prepare for the inevitable. I mean to question the idea of the proper time to begin mourning by creating ritual acts that use materials with preservative qualities. I also utilize material that is in this space between having a life and being dead, in doing so it becomes a negotiation of mortality, and mourning.
Navigating the loss of culture, and the future loss of life is a way to understand my own self-identification. These trains of thought come together as an understanding of loss, and act as a way to process, and accept them. Mourning is the only process in which to prepare for loss, and to understand loss. I embrace this as a part of my practice, and want to further my understanding of this arena.