Hand-painted ceramic tile installation
Amman Design Week 2026, Darat Abu Adnan, Jabal al-Weibdeh

My family made tiles in Jerusalem, and later in Amman. Kassicieh tiles carried our name stamped on the back and were laid into the floors of homes across both cities. I grew up knowing about these tiles mostly through stories and through the patterns themselves, the Palestinian carpet-tile motifs that covered entire rooms.

Small Inheritances is my way of picking up that thread. For Amman Design Week 2026, I made 51 tiles by hand in Albuquerque, then painted and glazed them, before shipping them to Amman. Each tile revisits one of those original carpet-tile motifs in my own visual language, looser, brighter, and more playful than the originals. I treated the inherited patterns as studies in color, rhythm, and movement, a way of keeping what was passed down while giving it room to change.

The tiles were installed on the stone steps of Darat Abu Adnan, a historic house in Jabal al-Weibdeh, where visitors were invited to sit with them and walk past them. Over the first week of the festival, people walked on them. Some broke, and others were lifted and moved. Rather than treat this as the end of the work, I came to see it as part of it. Gathered together, the intact and broken tiles became a record of that week, an accumulation of footsteps, fractures, and care, which fit the festival’s 2026 theme, Accumulations.

The work reflects on how inheritance rarely arrives whole. It is carried in pieces, and it is still ours.

Year: 2026
Materials: Handmade, hand-painted, glazed ceramic tiles
Edition: 51 tiles
Exhibited: Amman Design Week 2026, 2–17 October, Darat Abu Adnan, Amman, Jordan