Encased Clouds, 2023
Dried Thyme, Za’atar, sage, ground Turkish coffee, dried rose petals, dehydrated oranges, whole spices, dried chickpeas, white rice, lentils, rose water, Polyester Fiberfill, stockings.
"The cloud is not lost; it is transformed into rain, and the rain is transformed into grass and the grass into cows and then to milk and then into the ice cream you eat. Today if you eat an ice cream, give yourself time to look at the ice cream and say: Hello, cloud! I recognize you.” - Thich Nhat Hahn.
American theologist and writer, Katie Cannon, speaks of the act of “remembering what we never knew,” a way for our bodies to return to themselves—to ‘re-remember.’ Artist and researcher, Onyeka Igwe, calls this ‘Blood Memory,’ an embodied form of knowing that transcends individual cognition, rooted in the body as a continuation. Similarly, Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and global spiritual leader, advocated for the "emptiness" of the separate self, urging us to understand our bodies as ‘interbeing.’
Encased Clouds emerged from the need to capture a decaying memory to be retransformed. My grandmother, only 9 when she was forced to flee Jerusalem during the Nakba of 1948, remembers little of Palestine—just faint impressions, eroded by time. She faintly remembers the scents of coffee, spices, orange and thyme.
Stockings stretch over dried foods and polyester fiberfill, forming soft, fleshy, cocoon-like sculptures. The material both preserves and disperses the scent. The act of enclosing these ephemeral elements questions the nature of memory—fluid, never fully within our grasp, but always leaving a subtle mark in the space around us. It’s a reminder that memory isn’t fixed to one body or place, but seeps out into the world around us; something we can still, somehow, hold.
Encased Clouds was commissioned by Kunn Collective for the Damma Launch Party at OBJX Studios.