As an artist I think through making so, as the dust to vessel process began, I started making pots from terracotta clay, fashioning a kind of prototype using primitive methods sympathetic to the Marsh Arab’s baked pottery of Mesopotamia. A hib is a large terracotta vessel used for filtering polluted water and I started experimenting with different additions to the clay body to increase its porosity. As I researched further, I began to develop an uncanny affinity with the vill

I imagined the clay samples would be large, cylindrical core sections that would require intensive processing, after all my collaborators had talked about travelling to the UK with a suitcase full of mud instead of clothes. Would I have time to process the raw clay deposits and experiment with construction? I picked my technicians’ brains and watched endless YouTube videos on reclaiming and processing clay. Then, at last contact from the UK custodian of the precious clay samp

Shared water, contested water was inspired by issues of climate change and contested water in the Middle East’s ‘Garden of Eden’. Earth as recorder, kiln as creator, clay provides a historical link between human and nature - between the paleoclimate archive and the future demand for water. My first sculptural object was a response to the geographical location of the Al-Hammar Marshes in southern Iraq, the lands between two rivers - the Euphrates and the Tigris. Shared water r

The Archive and the Contested Landscape, Cambridge Festival of Ideas, October 2018. Does the historical landscape contain a hidden message for humanity - a warning about climate change? Tapping into contemporary art’s ‘archival impulse’, the research collaboration leading this exhibition not only crosses the disciplines of art and geology, but also geography - the first part of this exhibit took place in Cambridge whilst the second will be taking place in Basra, Iraq in 2019.