Sahar        Tarighi

The Warp and Woof of Freedom

Installation, Ceramics, Yarn

2021–ongoing

 

The Warp and Woof of Freedom is an ongoing installation and social practice that emerges from my Shamaran body of work. The project began with a material investigation of hair as a site of feminine identity, memory, and cultural transmission, focusing on the hair of Shamaran. While studying and designing her hairstyle, the practice gradually shifted from representation to process. By pushing the materiality of ceramics and experimenting with its relationship to softness, flexibility, and embodiment, I developed a method of fabric-cast ceramic braids. Through this process, clay began to behave like textile, and braiding became a way to think through form, memory, and resistance.

 

To date, I have created more than four hundred ceramic braids through my own studio practice as well as through presentations and community-oriented workshops at NCECA 2023, Berman Museum, and Urban Arts Space. These works have been exhibited across various solo and group exhibitions, continuously expanding through collective participation. The project is not finite. It grows through repetition, labor, and shared making, mirroring the continuity of oral history and embodied knowledge.

 

Braiding functions here as both material action and conceptual framework. In workshops, participants work with clay slip and fiber, embedding cut thread of fabric into clay slip and draying and shaping it into braids. Once fired, the fiber burns away, leaving behind a trace. What remains is an imprint of absence that speaks directly to presence. Like memory, what is buried resurfaces through form and texture. The ceramic braid becomes a physical archive of touch, time, and loss, creating space to reflect on lineage, displacement, and survival.

 

Within Kurdish culture, braiding holds deep symbolic significance. Long, intricately braided hair has historically functioned as a vessel of identity, resilience, and ancestral knowledge. Braiding often begins through intimate gestures. A mother tending her daughter’s hair. Sisters sitting together. Hands passing memory through touch. These personal acts extend into collective forms of resistance. In the Kurdish women’s liberation movement, especially in Rojava, women fighters braid one another’s hair while chanting Jin, Jiyan, Azadi. Woman, Life, Freedom. Through this ritual, braiding becomes a source of solidarity and strength, intertwining the personal with the socio political.

 

For me, the act of braiding is deeply inspirational. Every movement becomes a covenant, both collective and personal. A pledge to freedom, equality, and democracy. A promise embedded in repetition and labor. Braiding operates as an embodied philosophy, a shared ontological gesture that weaves together bodies, histories, and landscapes. It speaks to how lives are intertwined and how resistance is sustained through care. Through clay, yarn, and fire, The Warp and Woof of Freedom transforms braiding into a site of memory and commitment. Each ceramic braid holds traces of touch and absence, loss and resilience. Together, they form a growing textile of resistance. A living archive. A material declaration of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”.