Four Seasons Ramesh Gallery in Dubai brought us into a commission for the Ministry of Culture of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: a body of large-format handmade work, made in Fez, for a cultural setting.
What made it demanding was not any single piece. It was that the commission ran across four crafts at once — pottery, macramé, mixed-media sculpture and basketry. Each is a different workshop, a different master and a different way of going wrong, and all of it had to arrive as one coherent collection, at architectural scale, on one timeline.
Wall installation — 24 hand-painted pottery plates
Twenty-four plates, graduated from 60 cm down to 30 cm, each thrown on the wheel and painted by hand in cobalt, ochre and white. Hung together they read as a single composition, which means the decoration had to be designed across the whole set rather than plate by plate: the pattern scale steps down with the diameter so that the smallest plate does not look like a crowded copy of the largest.
Macramé wall pieces — 160 cm and 250 cm
Two monumental hangings, knotted entirely by hand. At this scale macramé stops being a textile technique and becomes a structural one: the weight of the cord pulls the work out of square as it grows, so tension has to be read constantly and corrected while knotting, never afterwards.
These three films follow it from raw fibre to the finished wall.
The sculpted vase — four artisans, one piece
A single vessel carrying raised cord-work in a labyrinth pattern, rosette medallions and a pierced disc, over a warm ochre ground. Four artisans worked on it, each on the part their craft owns, in sequence — the reason a piece like this cannot simply be ordered faster by adding people.
Woven planters in natural fibre
Basketry made to set dimensions rather than to the weaver’s habit, so the planters sit correctly with specified pot sizes and repeat exactly across the order.
What this project involved
- Four crafts coordinated as one commission: pottery, macramé, sculpture, basketry
- Large-format work — plates to 60 cm, hangings to 250 cm
- Made in Fez for an institutional end client, through a Dubai gallery
- Crated and shipped for the Gulf
