Literature

Randa Maddah's visual language extends into terracotta sculpture. Hand-built and kiln-fired, these works bear a direct relationship to the earth, their surfaces recording touch, pressure and heat. The same hybrid figures that populate her Hanging Gardens series migrate into three dimensions here - creatures suspended between the human, the avian and the botanical, caught in the same liminal passage between life and death that structures her paintings. In clay, each figure is a materialised spirit in the animist sense, which Maddah has long explored.

Her paintings work through layered pictorial space, but the terracotta works are defined by their singularity and their weight. Kiln-fired, they carry the evidence of transformation - shaped by hand, altered by heat, fixed in a moment of becoming that mirrors the reincarnatory logic at the heart of the Hanging Gardens project. The elemental substances of earth and fire are constitutive of its meaning: Maddah's cosmology, rooted in the land of the Golan Heights and the belief that the body is merely a garment the soul sheds and renews, finds in terracotta its most literal expression.