In a sense, I've always been making work that is about Palestine, how Palestinians have been treated, and what their reality is like. The basis for my landscapes is that the idea of Palestine is imaginary in the minds of diaspora Palestinians, who can't go and see it.
On a formal level, I'm making beautiful things with color and composition-painterly things that we can talk about. But intrinsically, the work wouldn't exist in this way if it weren't for the situation there.
I had been working toward making tile mosaics for several years. I focused on floor mosaics, like those from antiquity: Roman mosaics, Byzantine mosaics.
A lot of ancient art and artifacts have been discovered in Gaza, and in 2022, yet another discovery was made. Salman al-Nabahin, an olive farmer, unearthed a huge and well-preserved Byzantine mosaic underneath his farm in the Bureij Refugee Camp.
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