Sabah Abouelhadid

Bend To Hold: A Dialogue Between Flesh Water and Form

In this work I would like to focus on the intimate, ephemeral relationship between the human body and water, focusing on the gestures, forms, and movements we make to hold, carry, and contain it. Water, ever-shifting and formless: a cupped hand, a bowed shoulder, a curved spine. I’m drawn to these instinctive motions, the ways we shape ourselves into vessels, however briefly, to gather or receive.

PHASE 1: INSTINCTUAL GESTURES In the first phase of the project, I observe and interpret the body's natural language of movement with water: the curve of two hands joined to drink, the subtle dip of collarbones where droplets pool, the hollow of a palm or the crease behind a knee. These fleeting interactions are translated into ceramic sculptures, preserved impressions of motion and touch, of containment and release. The body becomes a container; the ceramics, a fossilization of gesture.

PHASE 2: CHALLENGED GESTURES - PARADOX In the second phase - I want to explore a paradox. Internally, we are containers, our bodies full of fluids, breath, blood, rhythm. But externally, we attempt to become vessels through posture and motion, mimicking the role of a container we already are. We are shaped for water on the inside, yet we still mold ourselves around it on the outside. This sculptural dialogue questions how we perceive water: as something bendable, obedient, shaped by us. It flows where we allow it, stops where we block it. But what if the body was no longer soft, no longer adaptable? I would like to create bodily extensions—ceramic forms that exaggerate or interrupt the gesture, forms that challenge movement rather than accommodate it. These works propose another reality, where we confront the limits of our own flexibility, and the illusion of control over something as fluid as water begins to fracture. In this context we bow and bend for water and not the other way around. -

**Reason why I chose ceramics as vessel extension to ourself: Across various mythologies and religions, the human form is said to have emerged from clay, malleable, earthen, shaped by higher hands. The sculptural vessels are not just records of movement, but also subtle returns to our own origin material. Through this work, I aim to ask: What does it mean to hold something that cannot be held? How do we choreograph ourselves around that which refuses to be fixed? And how can we make permanent the gestures we perform to keep it, even for a moment?