The Storied Object: Narrative Complexities in Crafted Works
Session 1 | June 8–20
A published essay on the dancing forms of ceramicist Magdalene Odundo’s work for the catalogue for Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects (2024, Princeton University Press). Photo by N. El-Hadi. 21¼" x 18½".
During Nehal El-Hadi’s residency, she will continue research, reflection, and writing on topics that consider the following: Crafted objects contain histories, geographies, temporalities, and meanings inherent in their existence. Narrative complexity is the ability to tell stories that provide historicity, highlight connections, convey context, and suggest implications—it is both understanding and a communication, and requires an engagement with the object that acknowledges and elicits multiple knowledges, contends with various chronographies and futurities, complicates space, site, location, and scale, and accounts for paradoxes, counterintuitions, and inherent tensions.
Nehal El-Hadi (she/her) is the Editor-in-Chief of STUDIO Magazine, a biannual print publication dedicated to contemporary Canadian craft and design. She received a Ph.D. in Planning from the University of Toronto, and her writing has appeared in academic journals, general scholarship publications, literary magazines, and several anthologies and edited collections. El-Hadi is currently researching human-sand relations, and co-edited (alongside Glenn Adamson) a special issue of Material Intelligence on the topic.
Visiting Artists do not teach workshops. These individuals are in residence throughout sessions and augment the creative practices on campus through their own research, informal activities, and integration into the session community.