Mother Palestine

Mother Palestine was born from a place of profound heartbreak and helplessness in response to the ongoing devastation in Gaza. When the scale of children killed became impossible to comprehend, the numbers threatened to slip into abstract statistics. As a mother and a maker who processes the world through hands and material, this work was born from a need to give that unfathomable loss a physical form, and a way to honour the lives behind the abstract tally. The project centers on a series of large wheel-thrown and handbuilt ceramic vessels, each representing a single month of the genocide since October 2023. They from a population of "mother" forms that are finished with dry glazes and oxides in tones that evoke the Palestinian landscape—the Mediterranean coast, ancient olive groves, limewashed stone, and dark volcanic rock. Piercing and threading each vessel are thousands of unglazed, hand-rolled clay beads, each one representing a child killed during that month. Raw, vulnerable, and clinging to the mother forms, the beads spill over and refuse to be contained during the months where the death toll is most vast and the grief heavy. Rolling tens of thousands of individual beads serves as a continuous, quiet ritual of bearing witness. By transforming an overwhelming body of data into an intimate, physical encounter with grief, Mother Palestine asks the viewer to pause, feel the tangible weight of every life counted, and hold space for fundamental human compassion above all else. THIS BODY OF WORK IS CURRENTLY FEATURED IN THE JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS (available to order online). Medium: Wheel-thrown and handbuilt ceramics, dry glazes, oxides, multi-clay unglazed beads. 12 forms = 12 months Dimensions: Variable (Installation series)