This article is part of our Design special section About how food inspires designers to make and do surprising things.
In 2019, Jessy Slim, a Lebanese American designer, had just started a graduated architecture program on the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., When protests burst into her birthplace, Beirut.
In October thousands took to the streets in a rebellion against the Lebanese government, a movement that eventually led to the installation of a new prime minister and president earlier this year. Mrs. Slim followed the unrest closely, while he was looking for a way to participate from a distance. To do this, she turned to a food with Lebanon: chickpeas.
“When I moved to Michigan, Dearborn I explored outside Cranbrook, where thousands of middle -olds are,” said Mrs. Slim, 34, who emigrated from Beirut with her mother and stepfather to San Diego.
“One day I went and bought a bag of 50 pound of chickpeas, brought it back to the studio and had a while,” she said. Eventually she transformed the legumes into clay.
“I actually made hummus and then put it in the oven,” she said. In the coming months, objects with Mrs Slim built and baked a series of Lebanese coffee ceremony objects, including a pot, cup and serving drawer. She also made a small hanging sculpture of a chickpeas textile that she made by painting the legumes on a mesh -like fabric. She mixed additives in the clay, including sand, glue and hibiscus, and investigated how they influenced the look, smell and performance.
Then the pandemic hit. With her studio in Cranbrook closed for six months, she left these experiments and went to Beirut, where she photographed the city and recorded on video, including the physical destruction caused by a chemical explosion in the port of the city in August 2020, so that she called a ‘visual sketchbook’. She investigated the setting up of a non -governmental organization that would unite local architects and builders in reconstruction efforts and supervise the distribution of help in response to future disasters, but the task became too overwhelming.
When she returned to Michigan, her chickpea objects were exactly in the state she had left, stored and stable like any conventional pottery. The material became Mrs. Slim’s primary medium for her artistic designs.
She was mainly under the spell of the peaks, valleys and cracks in the hanging sculpture. “I started exploring it as a kind of landscape,” she said about the destroyed surface. “It is almost like a mirror of what happens in Lebanon. The economic crisis and all the problems there are, were traced in that material.”
For her thesis project in 2021, she created a large-scale installation of running chickpea sailing over a Cranbrook gallery. Next month she has her first solo show in the Oakland Gallery Roll -Up Project (June 21 to August 6).
Thought it is one of the first domestic crops – proof of cultivation in Syria dates to the 10th millennium BC – chickpeas have long been a staple of the middle cuisine. Gretchen Wilkins, the head of the Cranbrook architecture program, noted that it embodied food for Mrs. Slim “So much memory and connection with home and family.”
“But those connections are also challenging and difficult,” she added, because Mrs. Slim is not in Lebanon.
Since the Graduate School, Mrs. Slim has worked as an architectural designer while making her art on the side. In September she participated in a group of San Francisco Group, ‘Works in Progress’, in which she exhibited ‘Nebula’, a strip of her chickpea fabric that stretched over a curved stainless steel frame (created in collaboration with Estudio material in San Francisco). She also showed a table piece ‘chickpea landscapes, 8’, which glowed wonderfully from the inside with the help of a light bulb.
Light is important for Mrs. Slim’s work, she said, because of the attention it attracts to texture. Asked if her illuminated object should be considered a sculpture or a lamp, she simply said it was art.
“For me, Jessy’s work has a kind of stealth message under the guise of a minimalist object: it combines aspects of homeliness such as cooking in a contemporary vocabulary,” said Peak Carnwath, a painter who was co-founder Roll -Up Project.
“Whether it is about knitting, cooking, quilting or ceramics, something that would be normal or in the past is considered a vessel to its legitimate place in art,” she added. “Jessy’s work uses the language of Ambacht in combination with abstraction.”
In the midst of the war between Hezbollah and Israel, Mrs. Slim was unable to travel safely to Beirut for almost two years, but is hopeful for the future of Lebanon in the light of the new government. “In the past year it is almost like a stamp that this work is important,” she said. “It has re -defined those fears and feelings for me and enabled me to tackle my personal story: being an immigrant with two cultural identities that will never disappear.”
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