The saj is a shallow domed steel plate used across the Levant to bake bread over an open flame. It is a kitchen object. Every household knows what it is.
Wafa's first works were painted on old saj that had already been used. The form held. Today the plates are made for her, unused, so the paint has clean steel underneath.
She works across painting, works on saj and hand-formed objects. Figure, Palestinian tatreez, Arabic letterform, architecture, landscape and botanical form all enter the same circle — and none of them stays as it arrived.
Every work is painted by hand, one at a time, in her studio.
One branch, painted twice. It enters at the left as an olive branch observed from life. By the time it reaches the right edge the same leaves are being painted as cross-stitch, in the grammar of tatreez.
Nothing in the picture announces the change. That is the method, and it runs through every work here: a dress becoming pattern, a city becoming stitch, a thread becoming structure.
Palestinian memory, painted at the moment
one thing is turning into another.
A single line leaves the hand and refuses to stay a line. It branches, gathers and repeats until a gesture has become a structure.
Most of the plate is left bare. The steel is part of the painting.
Jerusalem sits on the upper curve of the plate. Below it, tatreez rises like a second architecture — the same city, held in the other language a household keeps it in.
The dress does not carry tatreez as decoration. It becomes tatreez.
The woman is turned away in both works. She is not a portrait. She is the thing the pattern is happening to.
Where BETWEEN is still, these are built
entirely out of movement.
The circle stops being a frame and becomes the thing the figure is turning inside. Smaller plates, gold ground, one movement taken eight times.
Both collections, drawn here at true relative scale, from the front and from the side.
The depth matters as much as the diameter. The plate is domed, so it throws a real shadow on the wall and reads as an object before it reads as a picture.
Wafa paints to order. Any work in this brochure can be requested by its number and she will paint it again, by hand, on a new plate. It will be recognisably the same work, and it will not be identical — nothing painted twice by hand ever is.
Quote the work number — WA·B·04, WA·T·02 — from this brochure or from the shop.
Forming, priming, painting and curing. The larger BETWEEN plates sit at the longer end.
Signed by hand on the face, lower right, and entered in the studio record under its own number.
Each work leaves with a card naming the work, its materials and dimensions, and how to care for it.
The works are shown and sold through Tabrizi Crafts. What is on the wall on any given day is what is available that day. Everything else is painted to order.
The work begins with an object everyone already knows.
What happens inside it is entirely hers.