Breaking Bread, a ceramics exhibition, investigates food as a language of care, examining how recipes, shared meals, and functional pottery preserve cultural knowledge while creating opportunities for dialogue across communities.
I am a second-generation mixed-race Guyanese Canadian Muslim ceramic artist based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. Through ceramics, installation, sound, and functional objects, I investigate the intersections of cultural identity, migration, memory, and belonging. My practice draws from my lived experience while engaging with the histories of Islamic decorative arts, contemporary craft, and the everyday rituals that shape our understanding of community. Working primarily with clay, I see the vessel as both a functional object and a metaphor for the body. It carries memory, preserves culture, and records human touch. I am interested in the ways handmade objects become repositories for personal and collective histories, revealing how food, domestic rituals, and acts of gathering can communicate stories that words alone cannot. My work frequently explores the tension between beauty and discomfort. Decorative surfaces inspired by historical Islamic ceramics, architecture, and textiles coexist with forms that reference vulnerability, loss, and resilience. In works such as Grammar of War: Remnants, slumped ceramic vessels become quiet memorials to the ongoing effects of Islamophobia, displacement, and violence. More recently, projects including Grandma’s Recipes and Breaking Bread investigate food as a language of care, examining how recipes, shared meals, and functional pottery preserve cultural knowledge while creating opportunities for dialogue across communities. I am interested in expanding the role of ceramics beyond the pedestal, bringing together installation, sound, functional pottery, and participatory experiences to create immersive environments that invite reflection and conversation. Drawing from both historical Islamic craft traditions and contemporary ceramic practice, I seek to create work that honours inherited knowledge while contributing a distinctly personal voice to contemporary craft discourse. Ultimately, my practice asks how objects can hold memory, foster empathy, and create spaces where difficult conversations become possible. Through making, I hope to transform everyday acts of eating, listening, and gathering into opportunities for cultural exchange, understanding, and human connection.
