Sahar        Tarighi

Soil (Re)Membered 

Ceramics, clay, Sorghastrum nutans (Indian grass), grass seeds, wood, metal, paint

2025

 

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This work emerges from the meeting point of body and land—where the spine becomes a terrain and soil becomes a living memory. Formed through ceramic vertebrae planted with Sorghastrum nutans (Indian grass) and grass seeds, the sculpture holds both fragility and resilience. I embedded the clay I collected from Columbus, Ohio—land that belongs to the Myaamia (Miami) Nation—and used it as the soil from which the grass grows, allowing the piece to root itself in Indigenous ground and acknowledge the histories layered beneath the present landscape.

 

The spine functions as a border: a structure that carries weight, holds tension, and marks the edge between vulnerability and endurance. As the grass pushes through each vertebra and the rest of the sculpture, it performs an act of resistance—growth as survival, land reclaiming its space through the body.

 

This piece draws from the lived realities of Kurdish Kolbers, whose bodies bear the literal and political burdens of crossing borders. Their spines become sites of struggle and strength, carrying not only goods but entire histories of displacement, oppression, and resilience. By merging the back and vertebrae with living clay and new growth, the work reflects on how bodies hold landscapes, how land remembers bodies, and how survival itself becomes a continuous act of becoming.

 

Here, the spine becomes both a border and a bridge—an anatomy of movement, a landscape of endurance, and a reminder that life continues to grow through and despite imposed boundaries.