BIOGRAPHY
Born 1991 in Amman, Jordan, lives and works between Amman and London, UK
Drawing from her heritage and background in textiles and pattern-making, Raya Kassisieh’s multidisciplinary practice explores the politics of the body. Through sculptural recreations of natural forms and archival objects, she experiments with fibers and metals to explore the multitudes and renegotiations of being. Kassisieh’s work proposes that the body is a pliable form, the ultimate tool for re-imagination and creation. Articulating issues of autonomy through liminal states that transcend the body’s fixity, she works with soft and hard materials ranging from steel and copper to silks, wools and cotton to investigate the dissolution of the human condition and its potential for radical transformation.
Kassisieh studied at Pratt Institute, New York, and completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include, Islamic Art Biennale, Jeddah (2025); Hunna Art, Kuwait (2024); Bermondsey Project Space, London (2024); Bayt al Mamzar, Dubai (2022); Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2022); and Hangar Space, Amman (2022).
STASIS
Stasis is a presentation that culminates after seven weeks of investigation, writing, and experimentation as the inaugural resident at Gallery44, Primrose. The works shown mark new landings in my practice, shaped by the constant ebb and flow between writing and making, between the domestic space and the studio space.
In the studio, I committed to exploring the classic medium of oil and acrylic on cotton duck canvas. In the domestic space, I turned toward rumination, reading, writing, creating works on paper, and soft fibre pieces. This period allowed a rare harmony, where the two sites, the studio and the home, intertwined and became one continuous space of thought and making.
Being based in Primrose, with its decadent history of art and literature, much of my reading circled around the historically significant inhabitants of this area, most notably, Sylvia Plath, from whose writing many of the works borrow their titles..
ARTIST STATEMENT
"I work in steel, fabric, and gesture, tracing the thresholds between grief, memory, and matter. My practice is anchored in the phenomenological body; the body as a site of encounter, not object but vessel, where memory sediments and the political unfolds. I draw from my Palestinian heritage and life between Amman and the west, using personal inheritance as a lens to reimagine form, authorship, and autonomy.
The personal is not anecdotal. It is a methodology. I move from the private outward, allowing the intimate to crack open the structural. Feminist discourse teaches me that what is tender is also insurgent. I lean into the domestic, the archival, the intergenerational. My grandmother’s photographs, the sharp edges of steel, the softness of thread, they all become collaborators in articulating a politic of presence.
Making, for me, is a slow rehearsal. A choreography of cutting, welding, draping, forming and now, writing. I see my process as a hidden performance, one where grief becomes material. I do not aim to resolve. Instead, I ornament the wound. I stage what aches and moves. My works take mulitple forms from grand structures to intimate forms.
The works are not answers, they are insistences. In how a body; marked, muted, mythologized, can speak through space and trace. My pieces often sit between the ceremonial and the structural, playing with the tension between fragility and force. I think of making as a devotional act. A way to sound the unsaid, to ornament the wound, to stay with the trouble and document whats present."
RAYA K.