Description

“Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe the journey is unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place” -Paolo Coelho

Created during a year-long residency in Shigaraki, Japan, Unbecoming is a new collection of one-of-a-kind ceramic vessels that combine minimalist forms with bold surface patterns. Curves, geometric motifs, and the intentional use of negative space suggest movement—shifts, ruptures, and acts of shapeshifting.

Influenced by my family’s history as refugees from North Africa and my own experience of relocation across multiple countries, these formal gestures reflect both inherited and personal diasporic narratives—an ongoing negotiation between what is left behind, what is carried forward, and what is reshaped along the way: a process of “un-becoming.”

Made from a mix of uniquely pigmented clays and wild clays hand-harvested from the Japanese landscape, the collection speaks to an inner excavation—an undoing of excess to reconnect with something raw, grounded, and honest.

Unglazed, tactile, and distressed surfaces evoke a primal state of being. Shaped through firings in both gas and wood kilns, each piece bears the marks of fire, time, and chance—emphasizing transformation and material exploration through natural processes.