MATERIAL PRACTIC
1) From Soil to Studio
My work is grounded in two interconnected practices: the isolation of clay from collected soil, which becomes the material foundation of my work, and Argillotype, in which clay is reduced to dust and returns as image and text.
My work began in 2016 with travel and field collection. I gather soil from specific locations across the United States and transform it into workable clay through sustained acts of collecting, isolating, testing, and archiving. This material archive is ongoing and currently includes soil and clay from over 213 locations across 45 states, with the work continuing toward engagement with all states.
I work with clay as a material that carries place within it. The act of isolating clay from soil is both physical and attentional, requiring patience, listening, and response. As a Middle Eastern woman working with American land, my relationship to material is shaped by movement and proximity rather than ownership.
Clay moves through my practice as vessel, dust, and residue, forming installations, performances, and dust-printed poems. Across these forms, the work considers how place is encountered, inhabited, and remembered through material that has already lived elsewhere.
© Cornell Watson for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2025. Courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
© Cornell Watson for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2025. Courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
Photo by Amir Aghareb
© Cornell Watson for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2025. Courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
MATERIAL PRACTICE
2) From Ground to Paper
The Genesis of a New Practice
Argillotype emerges when clay, reduced again to dust, becomes pigment, image, and text.