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The Gossips
ceramic, acrylic cold finishing
~3.5x5x4.3" together
2025
My practice explores the colligation of comfort and discomfort found in nostalgia, language, home, memory, and the human tender nature: a ceaseless search for connection, for a tranquility in the self-made narratives of our past. Longing and community fostered in search of this humanity are especially important as a child of Arab diaspora. I am deeply inspired by a sense of “by-proxy memory." Storytelling and the written word of family—recipes of aunties, tales of friendships and homes traversed—expand the world of my own. How does personhood stretch when provided by memories of others as well as mine? What is memorialized when every grasp of home is vital? Formally, I engage with these ideas through laborious and repetitive processes as devotional acts, as well as delicate mark-making and soft materials that evoke the organic, and the ghostliness of memory. Material informs the coexistence of the hardy and kind, motif becomes language, and colorful and whimsical marks offer the eyes of a child: ones that we are taught to grow out of, yet which see all nonetheless.
Rana Huwais
@ranahana___
Rana Huwais is a Chicago-based Syrian American mixed media artist specializing in printmaking, ceramics, and soft sculpture. Her work focuses on explorations of cultural and personal memory, the peace and melancholy of nostalgia, the "code-ification" of language and motif, and an embrace of naive optimism in form and life. Her work has been shown nationwide and in international publications, such as Altiba9 Magazine and Needlebound. She also was responsible for the curation of multiple exhibitions as Albion College’s Curatorial Assistant in Dickinson Gallery.
The Gossips
ceramic, acrylic cold finishing
~3.5x5x4.3" together
2025
My practice explores the colligation of comfort and discomfort found in nostalgia, language, home, memory, and the human tender nature: a ceaseless search for connection, for a tranquility in the self-made narratives of our past. Longing and community fostered in search of this humanity are especially important as a child of Arab diaspora. I am deeply inspired by a sense of “by-proxy memory." Storytelling and the written word of family—recipes of aunties, tales of friendships and homes traversed—expand the world of my own. How does personhood stretch when provided by memories of others as well as mine? What is memorialized when every grasp of home is vital? Formally, I engage with these ideas through laborious and repetitive processes as devotional acts, as well as delicate mark-making and soft materials that evoke the organic, and the ghostliness of memory. Material informs the coexistence of the hardy and kind, motif becomes language, and colorful and whimsical marks offer the eyes of a child: ones that we are taught to grow out of, yet which see all nonetheless.
Rana Huwais
@ranahana___
Rana Huwais is a Chicago-based Syrian American mixed media artist specializing in printmaking, ceramics, and soft sculpture. Her work focuses on explorations of cultural and personal memory, the peace and melancholy of nostalgia, the "code-ification" of language and motif, and an embrace of naive optimism in form and life. Her work has been shown nationwide and in international publications, such as Altiba9 Magazine and Needlebound. She also was responsible for the curation of multiple exhibitions as Albion College’s Curatorial Assistant in Dickinson Gallery.