"Ceramics found me. During a visit to my family’s home in Ramallah, I came across a pile of broken pottery shards on the site where a ceramics factory stood in the 10th century. They were scattered, half-buried, exposed to the elements and left behind. I was drawn to them immediately. Who shaped them? What had they once held? I gathered them, carried them with me, and later absorbed them into my art practice, encasing them in clear glass or infusing them into my glaze, preserving them in their fragmented state. That moment was a turning point in my practice."
- Saj Issa
Palestinian American artist Saj Issa views ceramics as intimate repositories of touch, memory, and myth. In Never Make a Wish in a Dry Well, she borrows from an old adage, at once evoking the futility of ungrounded desires and the layered depth beneath surfaces that appear barren. The metaphorical dry well in Issa’s work is not, however, empty; it’s charged with hidden histories and the artist’s present-day encounters.
Flora emerges as a recurring motif running through this work. Flowers, for Issa, are loaded symbols of migration and survival. She reflects on the way they take root in unexpected places, the way they bloom despite, or perhaps in defiance of, human intervention. The Majnoona (bougainvillea), a tough, untamed bloom that thrives in dry, inhospitable environments, recurs throughout her work, its name—Arabic for ‘crazy’ or ‘hysterical’—a gendered marker of unruliness. The Majnoona, with its ability to flourish in adversity, brings us back to the title.
Ceramics are shaped by fire and time. Heated in the kiln, the material undergoes metamorphosis—becoming stronger but always on the verge of breaking. This tension between permanence and fragility runs through her practice. Ceramics became a central component in the artist’s output following a visit to her family home in Ramallah. Here, she came across broken pottery shards in the setting where a ceramics factory once stood. These discarded fragments from the 10th century—remnants of another maker’s hand—travelled back with her to the US, where she remediated them, preserving them in clear glass encasements or infusing them into her glaze, drawing them back into her present. It’s work that captures the narratives embedded in clay and the weight of fragmentation.
Glazed tiles—evoking the intimacy of domestic interiors—have since been central to Issa’s practice. Their structured geometry and repetitive forms provide a sense of order, a visual and tactile grounding amidst the artist’s movement between places. Yet, rather than adhering to traditional ornamental tilework, Issa pushes these compositions toward abstraction. Fractured patterns and layered pigments dissolve into shifting, unstable terrains, reflecting the landscapes she navigates physically and emotionally. Geometry, for Issa, is not simply decorative but a means of anchoring herself—a way to grasp at stability in the face of impermanence.
In contrast to the rigid structure of her painted tiles, Issa’s amphoras introduce a more corporeal presence. These vessels, with their curved silhouettes and rounded bellies, speak to the human body—held, handled, passed across generations and borders. Historically, amphoras carried olive oil and wine along ancient trade routes, but in Issa’s hands, they take on a new role as witnesses and storytellers. Some are carefully formed in ceramic, their surfaces bearing traces of the artist’s touch; others are cast in steel—unyielding, industrial, weighty. This tension between materiality reflects a deeper meditation on what is fragile and what is forced to withstand.
Issa’s work suggests escape—into nature, into abstraction—but her landscapes never offer pure refuge. Instead, they become a site of reckoning, where the personal and political tangle, where the kiln's fire, the shattered ceramic, and the hardy bloom all witness what persists.
