When Clay Becomes Figures

The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts presents "When Clay Becomes Figures" (حين يصبح الطين جسدًا), a solo exhibition of ceramics by the Jordanian artist Khuzama AbuJoudeh. The show opened on Thursday 17 September 2026 in the gallery's Wasl Gallery, Building 2, and remains on view until 8 October 2026.

Developed over several years, the exhibition brings together 52 ceramic sculptures and pieces. The gallery describes a personal body of work "exploring memory, fragility, strength, and transformation, where clay carries the traces of experience and gives form to what words cannot express". AbuJoudeh works in both raw ceramic finished with pigments and oxides and in glazed ceramic. The contrast between rough, earthy surfaces and polished, saturated ones gives each piece several layers of texture and colour.

The works fall into three groups. In the Tulip series, forms caught between closing and opening stand for birth, renewal and transformation. The Horizon series turns to depth and layered surfaces, each revealing what lies beneath, as a way of thinking about the memories and experiences that keep shaping the self.

In the third group, the Bull, strength and resilience take shape in cracked bodies that carry the marks of what they have been through yet stay whole. Rather than hiding the fissures that can open in the kiln, AbuJoudeh keeps them as part of the work, so that breakage becomes, as the Jordan News Agency put it, "the place from which strength begins".

Throughout the show, AbuJoudeh speaks about clay as she speaks about people: about fragility and strength, anger and memory, and the ability to reshape oneself and hold together despite what has broken inside. Hosted by the country's national gallery, the exhibition gives a sustained, museum-scale platform to a ceramic practice that treats the medium as a living material holding the traces of what has passed through it.