Hania Jneid creates objects and spaces for fragile memory. Her practice moves across ceramics, lighting, painting and furniture design — not as separate disciplines but as a single obsession expressed in different materials and at different scales. Each piece is an attempt to give physical form to what memory cannot hold on its own: the weight of inherited opulence, the quality of light through a carved screen, the feeling of a mother’s hands, the way a child sees colour before language tells them what it means. The opulence in her work is not decorative. It is cultural memory — the richness of a Middle Eastern visual inheritance that carries within it centuries of craft, geometry, and the understanding that beauty is not a luxury but a form of dignity. This is where her work begins, regardless of where it ends up. Her lamps carry the memory of light. Rooted in the arabesque and the geometric shadow-play of Middle Eastern interiors, they transform any room they enter — throwing patterns that the body recognises before the mind does. They bring a specific quality of light, ancient and opulent, into contemporary spaces far from its source. For those who know that light, the recognition is immediate and wordless. For those who don’t, something in them understands it anyway.Her naive vases hold the memory of self. Hand-built, imperfect, alive in the way only handmade things are — they are objects that look like childhood feels. Tender, unresolved, full of a feeling that has no name but that the body remembers. They are vessels for the earliest memories. The ones that formed you before you knew you were being formed. Her paintings and ceramic objects look at the world through a child’s eye — unfiltered, bold, satirical in the way that only real tenderness can be satirical. They are not naive. They are a conscious decision to keep seeing before the world’s categories close in. The lips, the bold colour, the deliberate imperfection — these are acts of resistance as much as acts of making.
