Raya Kassisieh’s practice is shaped by lineage, by softness and rupture, and by the emotional temperatures of the materials she works with. Born in 1991 in Amman and now living between Amman and London, she draws from her heritage and her background in textiles and pattern making to explore the body as a site of memory, ecology, and transformation. Working with steel, copper, silks and wool, Raya carries the sensibilities of the landscapes that shaped her — from familial stories to the slow, attentive rhythms of places like Mahis — letting instinct become method and transformation become language.
All images are courtesy of Martin Ong Yamabo.
١. When you sculpt, whose body are you really in conversation with? Your own, or the echo of the ones that shaped you?
I always begin with my own body. It is my primary tool for feeling, thinking, and making. It is the thing I know best, and sometimes the thing I do not know at all. But it does not really stop there. I am aware that my body comes from the bodies before me, from the women and men in my lineage. From this place, I begin to engage with the bodies around me, the ones I am curious about, bodies like mine and bodies unlike mine, including the bodies of plants and inanimate matter.
٢. How do you know which material a story wants to live in?
Everyone is always so curious about my materiality and why it is so diverse, but in truth I think material dexterity is completely transferable. From my origins in draping I could create in soft materials, and from pattern making I could work with steel, and from drawing I could paint, and so on. I think my material choices for each work tend to come out of circumstance more than anything.
It is not really a story, I try to capture but a feeling, an instinct, a hidden message about the complexity of contemporary life. I reflect what I am surrounded by and produce from there.
٣. Is there a memory you carry that feels too heavy to sculpt, or too fragile to let go of?
I think there is still a feeling that has yet to come out. It is that tingling overwhelm in the chest, it is so numbing it almost burns. I think I have not yet been able to truly translate the viscerality of that daunting presence of grief, life, mortality, and contemporary emotional complexity.
٤. Do you remember a moment in your life when you felt your own form shifting in that same way?
I have had many transformations in this life, lived many lives in a way. I am finally settling more into my own now, I have found a rhythm, my own pulse, though it is everchanging, it is resolved. I struggled a lot, I unraveled, almost dissolved at times, but with my commitment to making, to transmuting the overwhelming grief of daily life and its dissonance, it has allowed me to settle. Its funny, they say time heals all, with every year that passes I find that statement truer and truer even in self.
٥. Has there been a city that changed the way you understand the body, or the way you inhabit your own?
I was born to my parents in Amman, myself in New York, and now I am renewed in London through way of Amman again. My biggest change in vessel (or body) came actually with my time in the UAE when I lived and worked in Dubai. I have had a very complex relationship with my body, I was met with many sizes on the scale, and in each city I really was very different in how I inhabited myself. Succinctly, I guess in Amman I occupied it with youthful confusion, in New York with naïve curiosity, in Dubai through warmth and health, and in London concealed most of it due to the weather, finding my way with it there now.
My relationship with my body will always be an ever evolving state I believe, fluctuating in presence whether it be mind over body or body over mind, the forever debate.
٦. What emotion do you find yourself returning to again and again, even when you think you’ve already exhausted it?
Heartbreak is the pain I return to, to break my heart open so the infinite can pour through. That is where I seek to go, to make from the void through vessel. This may seem very abstract, but to make from within and through lineage, that is where I hope to go when I make. It is not so often that I can meet myself at this place, but it is always the place of infiniteness for me.
