Artist Statement ꩜

“My practice explores the colligation of comfort and discomfort found in nostalgia, language, home, memory, and the “human” tender nature: a ceaseless search for connection, for a tranquility in the self-made narratives of our past. Longing and community fostered in search of this humanity are especially important as a child of Arab diaspora. I am deeply inspired by a sense of “by-proxy memory." Storytelling and the written word of family—recipes of aunties, tales of friendships and homes traversed—expand the world of my own. How does personhood stretch when provided by memories of others as well as mine? What is memorialized when every grasp of home is vital?

Formally, I engage with these ideas through laborious and repetitive processes as devotional acts, as well as delicate mark-making and soft materials that evoke the organic, and the ghostliness of memory. Colorful and whimsical marks offer the eyes of a child, ones that we are taught to grow out of, yet which see all nonetheless.”