Dr. Wasma’a Chorbachi, artist and expert in Islamic Art and History, bridges Mesopotamian and contemporary Western cultures. She was born in Cairo of Iraqi parents and lived in Baghdad during the early years of her life. “My earliest recollection of my love for clay and the excitement of firing a piece of clay goes back to when I was five years old. During promenades on the banks of the Tigris River, I discovered that these Mesopotamian clay deposits were the greatest toy. The making of the piece and the material transformation with its sense of magic, overwhelmed my imagination. After that, I often ‘played’ with clay and found that it brought me joy and peace of mind,” Chorbachi writes. Educated in the best Islamic, European and American traditions, she earned her Ph.D. from Harvard with a thesis on The Meeting of Science & Art in Islamic Civilization: Design in Islamic Architectural Decoration.
Chorbachi recently taught a course entitled “The Arabesque and Islamic Geometric Pattern Design” to M.I.T. architecture students. She also teaches a practical course at the HCP Studio on the structural rules of pattern formation, along with the fabrication of tiles and murals, low-fire techniques of decorating and glazing, and luster firing. Students are attracted to the topic of pattern formation because it shows how the simplest design can become a complicated tapestry with only a few fixed moves of the design elements.
Chorbachi works in the Islamic calligraphic tradition, primarily in clay, but also through painting on large pieces of silk. The central theme of Chorbachi’s surface design is Arabic calligraphy, a prayer or a poem, which is surrounded by textural patterning. Inscription is the dominant feature of Chorbachi’s plates, tiles and murals in which the background is expressed in extraordinary textures, patterns and colors that refer to her ancestral land. These surrounding decorative areas remind us of the traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and the first attempts of humans to create a written and numerical system on clay tablets with an angled wooden stylus.
Chorbachi’s work retells the ancient Islamic story within a contemporary context and holds its own side by side with its origins as can be seen in various exhibits and museums throughout the world where her work is shown. To see more of Wasma’a’s work, click here.
~Raquel Wharton Rohr excerpted from vol 1. number 3 Spring 2009 of Sgraffito, the Harvard Ceramics Program newsletter
