(Be)longings Project 1.0: Hiraeth
Artists’ Statement
Sharing strength and fragility, clay and scent are vessels of memory. Their identity can be shaped, broken, and reshaped, remembered, forgotten. Materiality is their very essence, carrying emotional residue, good and bad. They invite a second look, refusing neat endings, demanding complex beginnings.
Pan-cultural casualties, and survivors of time and (dis)placement for millennia – both, indelibly mirror the complexity of human experience and identity. They can shape us as much as we can break them: the animate, the inanimate, place, and memory, become one and many, ad infinitum.
In this multidisciplinary collaboration, award winning aromatherapist Yasmine ElGhamrawy responds with an olfactory thread, to the critical inquiry on the uncanny, notions of ‘home’, ornamentation, materiality, and displacement, by mixed media artist, ceramicist, and researcher, @Michaelancholia. This mixed media art installation pictures the ineffable inter-connectivity between displaced and ‘found’ objects loaded with esoteric dialects of time, place, and the self: (be)longing/s of ‘home’.
Figurative and ornamental ceramic artefacts populate this liminal space we call ‘home’. Thrown, discarded pots made by anonymous hands and destined for clay reclaim, are re-sculpted, abstractly recreated and (un)recognisable.
Yasmine ElGhamrawy’s fecund archive of precious oils, disrupt and harmonise the space, and the objects within – manipulated, teased, and celebrated in the moment – for what they have now become.
What do I know here? What can I trust, what do I remember, why is this (un)familiar, what do I feel?
@Michaelancholia and Yasmine ElGhamrawy
27th June 2025