I am an artist who works primarily and uniquely with clay. I am born in Beirut/ Lebanon in 1958, most of my young and adulthood age was under the bombs due to the consecutive wars, from civil wars to various invasions...
My tutor/maître Tourneur was Dorothy Salhab Kazemi, the pioneer Lebanese ceramist who was trained under the renowned Danish ceramist Gutte Eriksen.
I opened my studio in 1983 during the war and started producing functional earthenware pots with a variety of glazes fired to cone 5. After my first exhibiting, in 1987 I went to Goldsmith’s college in London to earn a post graduate degree in ceramics.
When I was back, the war was nearly over, and all of Beirut was to be destroyed to be rebuilt, this was the subject of my exhibition “Beirut Blues”. After its destruction, Beirut became the biggest archaeological site of the world and I was called upon as a ceramist to excavate. This led later to another exhibition titled “face efface” where I used discarded roman sherds with my ceramics heads. With a Lebanese artist /Greta Naufal we had a major exhibition at Millesgarden museum in Stockholm/Sweden, where they have one work of each in their permanent collection.
In 2005 there was a huge wave of assassinations which shook our country again.
I made the 6 exploded cars and I tackled the subject of murder by over smoothing the surface to be smoked afterwards. I won the Sursock museum first prize for these cars... (Sursock museum is our one and only Lebanese contemporary museum)
In 2006 Lebanon was invaded again by Israel, we lived a month of serious threat for our lives. All the schools and universities were filled with displaced children from south of Lebanon I took these children’s drawings about the war and animated them in stop motion “the war on Lebanon” was shown in many countries around the world.
In 2013 I had an exhibition called interception, the subject being again shooting…I sculpted kids with guns camera, shooting devices, the guns fire water and intercepts with the opponent creating a beautiful splash. In 2015 my exhibition “without traces” was about Lebanese houses constructed in the 20’s and 30’s. it was my desire to visit our home again. I made several in order to visit people’s memory again…. These houses were gutted out partially destroyed ready for complete destruction for developer’s projects…