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Carried
Carried
Acrylic, chalk, pastel and ceramics
40 × 44 cm
Acrylic, chalk, pastel and ceramics
40 × 44 cm
I am interested in what materials can hold: memory, place, history and possibility.
The small ceramics placed above the painting were collected during childhood visits to my place of heritage in North Africa. I have carried them for many years. They have become vessels of memory, reminders of home, family, and a slower way of living.
They recall my grandmother baking bread in a tanour, a dome-shaped clay oven. I remember the heat, the earth, the handmade objects within the home and a life closely connected to the materials of the land. Clay, mud, wood and bark become connected to ideas of making, belonging and ancestry.
The painting grows from this material relationship. Its surface is built through layers of texture and colour, becoming almost weathered or excavated. Earthy reds, browns, greens and ochres suggest both landscape and accumulated memory.
The ceramics remain small, but hold a larger history. I first encountered them as a child, and have carried them into adulthood. In the time between, the world around them has changed, culturally, politically and socially, while these objects have remained. Their materiality offers something quieter and more enduring. Mud is still mud. Clay is still clay. Earth remains available to be gathered, shaped and transformed by human hands.
The work sits between change and permanence, memory and history, nature and making, what is inherited and what is created, and the places we come from and the places we carry with us.
Artist Name
Jumana Rwifa
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