Artist Statement:
My name is Kaneez Zehra Hassan, and my ceramic art practice is known as Zia Ceramics Design. I am a Pakistani-American ceramic artist based in Utah, USA. My practice is rooted in the slow, tactile rituals of hand-building—coil, pinch, and slab—and deeply influenced by themes of identity, memory, and storytelling. I work primarily with stoneware, slips, and textured surfaces that bear the marks of erosion and time. Some vessels are bound with cotton thread, a gesture of quiet mending that honors what endures even in fragmentation.
My work draws inspiration from archaeological fragments, devotional forms, and objects of daily ritual. I am particularly interested in how vessels hold not only material, but also stories of survival. As someone shaped by diaspora and layered identities, I approach clay as both a grounding force and a carrier of ancestral resonance.
The philosophy of wabi-sabi, with its reverence for imperfection and transience, informs my forms and surfaces. I seek to create works that embrace rawness and irregularity, while inviting reflection on the beauty of what is weathered and carried forward.
Each piece emerges slowly, guided as much by intuition as by structure. I aim to create objects that invite intimacy and contemplation—works that feel timeless yet personal. In this way, my ceramics become quiet offerings: rooted in cultural continuity, shaped by lived experience, and carrying the resonance of stories that outlast words.
Cultural Statement:
As a Pakistani-American woman artist living in Utah, I carry the weight and richness of layered identities. My work emerges from this in-between space: shaped by ancestral traditions, the lived reality of diaspora, and the urge to preserve heritage through a woman’s perspective in a world that often forgets or erases it.
I come from a lineage of storytellers who valued quiet craft as a form of survival. Though not ceramicists, my ancestors built, mended, and created with both their hands and words. My practice continues that continuum, honoring inheritance while reinterpreting it for the present. Clay becomes not just material but language—one through which I speak of displacement, resilience, and belonging.
My approach is shaped by both gender and culture. I use clay as vessel and voice, echoing women’s often-unseen labor of preservation, care, and continuity. At the same time, I draw from the philosophy of wabi-sabi, which resonates with Sufi traditions of embracing imperfection, repair, and endurance. By binding vessels with cotton thread or leaving surfaces marked by erosion, I reference both Japanese aesthetics and South Asian practices of mending textiles and treasuring the patina of time. This cross-cultural dialogue is central to my voice: rooted in one culture, shaped by another, and speaking across both.
In an art world that often prizes polished narratives, I am drawn to what is fragmented, weathered, and incomplete. My ceramics are cultural touchstones, inviting reflection on how memory and heritage endure, adapt, and transform.
Through this work, I hope to bridge personal history with broader cultural conversations, contributing to a field where women and artists of diaspora can assert their voices and expand what belongs within contemporary ceramics.