When I started looking through Raya Kassisieh’s work, I noticed that one figure kept appearing: her grandmother, Claudette. Raya dedicated Heavy Petals ح د د, Heavy Petals II ح د د, and Wharda to her, transforming her memories of Claudette into monumental roses made of steel.

I wanted to understand why Raya chose to dedicate these works to her grandmother, what role Claudette played in her life and which memories of her she continues to carry. In this conversation, Raya speaks about her grandmother’s tenderness, her Palestinian story and the small acts of care that made her feel loved and safe — and explains how art allows her to preserve Claudette’s memory and keep her close.

— Raya, you came from a home shaped by women, and the person who shaped you most was your grandmother, Claudette. You even dedicated several artworks — Heavy Petals, Heavy Petals II and Wharda — to her.

— I was at the RCA studying sculpture and exploring spatial work. I decided to make something I wanted to look at in remembrance of my Grandmother, Claudette.

The first work I made was an erect cut rose, which lives in my parents’ home now. I titled it You are more than the world to me; my eyes will never tire of seeing you. I will hold on to this work forever. It was my first way of monumentalising her and transmuting my grief through the dance of making.

When I had the opportunity to work with the Diriyah Biennale, I wanted to expand on it. I hoped to create a serene but dark-coloured composition that brought forward the idea of generative grief. That is how Heavy Petals ح د د started.

It was created with the understanding that it could be rearranged multiple times. In its lifetime, it has now been shown twice in two completely different arrangements — in Jeddah at the Islamic Art Biennale in its original form and at SAMoCA in a reimagined formation for the Night of Lifetime show. It is a never-ending cycle of arranging, remembering and staying with her memory.

In the work, I wanted to bring forward the tenderness, softness, emotionality and sense of offering that an artist brings to an audience, to themselves, to the person they are remembering or memorialising, and to whatever they are investigating.

The work was driven predominantly by anger, non-acceptance and denial of the illness and death of my beloved grandmother, as well as the witnessing of Slaughter in Gaza. I realised that working with metal required so much physical effort that it helped transmute all of that dissonance into forms of productivity. I guess it helped me manage the unfathomable in some way.

It was a massive learning curve and an incredible revelation. The more deeply I immersed myself in the work, the more I discovered. I realised that the Arabic words for mourning and metal come from the same root word (ح د د ). The synergy of it all was extraordinary.

The more I looked, the more the Damascene Rose began to appear throughout my/our collective history and cultural context, leading me to Islamic arabesque artwork, and how the use of florals is a form of adornment, and perhaps even worship in high Islamic Art: tending to what is there with intentionality, celebrating it, memorialising it, and attempting to come closer to a beauty that is larger than us.

My grandmother always carried a sense of sorrow around speaking about her familial exile — she was exiled at the age of four — but she carried where she came from with such pride. She was an urban Palestinian woman from a cultured family and an educated background. Their displacement was very difficult for her, as it is for all Palestinians.

There was a lot of nuance in my mind at the time: the safety I lived in, being a Palestinian Jordanian, the weight of losing my ancestor, the collective grief of witnessing genocide. I did not know where to place my personal grief along the collective grief; it felt mammoth. It was such a cacophony of sorrow and injustice that I simply couldn't but stay with it.

There is life in the work, not only grief. Someone once said to me the works feel like an epitaph for the arab world. I think a lot about this statement. For what else is an epitaph but a personal monument to say, we are here, we have been here.

— But why, among all flowers, did you choose roses?

— There were so many roses in her life! Her earrings were roses. Her hair brushes had roses on them. She wore rose brooches. Her wedding headdress had fabric roses. Her curtains had rose patterns. She just loved roses.

I remember bringing her roses, and how much she loved them, especially yellow roses.

— What was Claudette like?

— She was home, my home, my security, my safety and my confidant.

She really held the space of a warm grandmother's home; she cooked all the time. She was so proud of her crochet and cross-stitch projects from her formative years, and she held on to them, even if a few showed bullet marks from the unrest in Jordan in the 70s. Now I have inherited them and hold on to them dearly as well. I actually partially continued one of her unfinished pieces using my hair. It's an heirloom I hold on to closely.

She was the kindest woman ever. She is a beacon of endurance and a compass for love. She was a very tender human. She loved to laugh, travel, cook and be with loved ones.

I have never met anyone as kind, forgiving or accepting as my grandmother. She was always very gentle despite the extremely difficult life she had. Her loss left me with something: the urge to go towards difficult things and to make things of it.

— Maybe you could share some more memories of her?

— Oh, I have a lot! When she came to New York, we went to see the Statue of Liberty. But instead of seeing the rest of New York, she took me to the grocery store and spent days cooking food for me to keep in the freezer after she left.

In Jordan, we would go out for Chinese food, then stay up watching TV, as she cut fresh fruit for her and me. We’d snack a lot. One of the sweetest moments I remember is her opening sunflower seeds for me with her teeth and keeping them in a tissue for me until they became a handful, and I would just scarf them down at once. I did not think much of it then, but now as I look back, I am in awe of the generosity I was given. Imagine opening seeds for like 10 mins straight, not eating any, just to have your grandchild scarf them down at once. She loved it, and I love her for it.

I would sleep over at her house, and we would have our girls’ nights in. She would open her jewellery box and ask, “What do you like?” Then she would let me wear the pieces and make a mess of her closet with zero complaints.

She would take me shopping for shoes in the most ridiculous places downtown, in those old shops selling "Italian-made" shoes.

If I were feeling bad, I would go to her, and she would fill my belly with food and saturate my skin with hugs.

She took me to Jerusalem, the only time I have ever been. She showed me all of Palestine.

She always made sure our family was brought together. She drove me when no one else could take me or when my parents were working. She would put me in the car, drive me wherever I wanted, wait for me and tend to me.

If I wanted my friends to come over for a massive meal, she never hesitated to cook for us. I do not even know where to begin with the memories.

I remember her putting rollers in my hair while she was doing her own. I remember her taking me with her when she had her nails done so I could have my little toes painted.

She was so gentle. She would bring these tea towels and cover our stomachs while we napped on her couch after we had eaten her delicious food because she believed that you had to retain the heat in your gut area as you digested.

She was a tender presence like that, doing things nobody else would have thought about, but doing them with such intention.

I remember the summer heat and the fan being on in her home. I loved sleeping over at her house. When my grandfather was alive, I would sleep between them. Their two beds were pushed together, so there was a gap between them. She would shift all the way to the edge so that I could lie comfortably next to her.

She was a very caring human being, but not only with me. I saw that at the funeral. I could barely lean over to kiss goodbye because so many people felt that she was theirs too and wanted to say their farewells.

She used to sing to me a lot, and there is a lullaby I still sing. No one else seems to know it except her and her sister.

Whenever I lost something and became really worked up about it, she taught me to pray to a saint (we are a Christian Arab family). She would tell me to take a tissue, crumple it and say something that translates as, “Dear Saint Anton, please bring it here.” Then I would throw the tissue behind my back.

It was this old spiritual, Christian, mystical tradition from Jerusalem, and it would really work. She made things easier to accept and handle. I have these memories in my bones.

— Raya, thank you for sharing this. I am sure you are planning to dedicate more artworks to your grandmother. Am I right?

— Yes, definitely. I have not stopped investigating the rose, and that will continue. I now call my roses the Claudette Roses. I have just made a more domestically scaled composition. I used copper for its intimacy and for its heat conductivity.

I have a lot of photos of her, most of them taken by her husband, my grandfather, Sami. The amount of joy you can see in photos of my Claudette is incredible.

I decided to work with this archive to make something for her. The first thing I did was reprint some photos from her archive onto copper plates. The work was called Before I Knew Her.

Why did I choose copper? Because it is a very heat-conductive material. The hope was that onlookers' hands would handle the images, bringing them to body temperature. In turn, through a moment of intimacy with the image, they would animate her again, for what is more alive is the temperature of the human body at 37 degrees.

I am really excited that I have now been able to return to these monumental roses and begin investigating them in more intimate compositions for her, in a way that feels true to who she was: tender.

— What would she say if she saw your artworks?

— I think she’d love the work, but she’d tell me why it is black? She hated when I wore black; she loved colour, she’d tell me to bring colour into my roses. And I think she would have cried a lot to witness how greatly I miss and remember her love.