Leftovers

video, stitched stoneware plates, tabbouleh, samakeh harra, embroidery floss

Leftovers (duration: 00:28:56) is a film using the stitch plates exploring the ritual of eating, one filled with intention, care, exhaustion.

The piece was inspired foremost by the cultural and familial reverence toward food and its preparation. Cooking is a time of bonding and exchanging histories. Waste was the ultimate taboo, the leftovers were as venerated as the fresh. To know someone is to eat with them. An Arabic expression says, “بيناتنا خبز وملح”: between us is bread and salt.

With extraneous health issues in the past few years waning my appetite, eating and cooking has become more difficult. The surgical, sterile, haziness of the film reflects this, but is juxtaposed by the unavoidable care and patience needed to painstakingly stitch together ceramic. Here, I create a cycle. I construct the vessel of consumption, of sustenance, of bonding, left alone with the vessel as I create it and then eat from it, enjoying my mother’s dishes that I can never refuse as they drip through the cracks.