This hands-on workshop invites participants to explore braiding as an embodied practice rooted in Kurdish culture and feminist resistance. Working with clay slip and fiber, we will engage the braid as a gesture of care, connection, and collective memory—a tactile way of holding intergenerational knowledge. Participants will embed fabric into clay slip and form braids that will be fired in the kiln. As the fiber burns away, it leaves behind a trace—an imprint of absence that speaks to presence. Like memory, what has been buried begins to surface through form and texture, creating space for reflection on displacement, lineage, and survival.
In Kurdish culture, braiding holds deep symbolic weight. Long, intricately braided hair is common among Kurdish women, serving as a vessel of identity, resilience, and ancestral knowledge—a way of remembering and resisting through the body. Braiding often begins in intimate gestures—a mother tending her daughter’s hair, the bonds of sisterhood, the touch that carries memory. This bodily act expands into collective forms of resistance. It is central to the Kurdish women’s liberation movement. In Rojava (Western Kurdistan), women fighters braid each other’s hair while chanting “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî”—“Woman, Life, Freedom.” Through this ritual, braiding becomes a source of collective strength and solidarity, entwining personal and socio-political struggle.
Together, we consider how material, memory, and movement can braid individual stories into shared acts of resistance and repair.
This event is held by one of the curators for Fragmented-Recaptured, a group exhibition on view at Urban Arts Space in downtown Columbus from July 22–August 16, 2025. Please note that this workshop takes place on Ohio State campus at Hopkins Hall, Room 054, in the ceramics studio.
This workshop is limited to twelve participants, but a waitlist will be available if it becomes filled.
Also check out other Workshops in Columbus, Exhibitions in Columbus, Arts events in Columbus.
