Saj Issa on Never Make a Wish in a Dry Well

Tabari Artspace: Can you introduce yourself and your practice?

Saj Issa: I’m a Palestinian American artist working across painting, ceramics, sculpture, and video. My work is deeply invested in material memory—how objects absorb history, how landscapes hold traces of the past, how migration leaves imprints that endure in unexpected ways. I move between mediums because each one offers a different way of witnessing and archiving.

Flora, ceramics, and geometry have become central to my practice. Flowers, in particular, carry a weight of symbolism—they are transient, but they return; they are fragile, yet they survive. Ceramics hold a different kind of time—they are shaped by fire, hardened, and made to last, but they also shatter. Geometry, in contrast, provides structure—a grounding element in a world that often feels in flux. These three forces shape the way I think about material, history, and place.

TA: What is the significance of ceramics and geometry in your work?

SI: Ceramics found me. When I visited my family home in Ramallah, I came across broken pottery shards in an olive farm built at the site of a ceramics factory dating back to the 10th century. These fragments, discarded and half-buried, felt like echoes of past hands—remnants of something unfinished, something left behind. I took them with me, later encasing them in glass, preserving them in their fractured state rather than restoring them. That act became a foundation in my practice and saw me focus primarily on ceramics. 

Ceramics are shaped first by man then by fire, by pressure, by time. They become stronger in the kiln, yet they always remain on the verge of breaking. That contradiction—strength and fragility, permanence and impermanence—sits at the core of my work. It mirrors the experience of displacement, of carrying history within oneself while constantly adapting to new contexts.

Then, there’s geometry. It’s a repetitive system I return to as a way of creating stability in flux. My painted tiles draw from Palestinian domestic interiors, from architectural patterns worn by time. Traditionally, geometry in Islamic art is precise, ordered, and sacred, but in my work, it becomes something else—fractured, layered, and shifting. It reflects the landscapes I navigate as a member of the diaspora, the sense of being both grounded and unmoored.

TA: Describe your approach and technique. How do colour and material shape your work?

SI: I work intuitively but also deliberately. Each material I use—ceramics, steel, paint, glass—carries its own weight and purpose.

Colour is just as intentional. Magenta, in particular, runs through this body of work. It’s tied to Palestinian flora, to regional mythology, to the heat and intensity of the Mediterranean landscape. It pulses with urgency. 

TA: Who have been your aesthetic influences?

SI: Richard Mayhew’s ethereal landscapes, David Hammons’s material interventions, Mona Hatoum’s charged minimalism, and Joan Mitchell’s gestural intensity have all shaped my visual language.

TA: How do you feel when you’re producing your work?

SI: It feels like excavation—like recovering fragments and assembling them into something that makes sense, even if it remains unresolved. There’s both confrontation and healing in the process—an acknowledgement of what has been lost and what continues to persist.

TA: How do you see art’s power to process complex emotions?