Throughout her practice, Beirut-based ceramicist Nathalie Khayat (b. 1966; Beirut, Lebanon) harnesses the inherent material properties of clay to examine the poetic tensions between structure and fluidity, containment and release in objects infused with reminders of human ritual and the fragility of life. Through an intuitive dialogue with clay—alternately extruded, thrown, and hand-built—Khayat constructs sculptural forms that oscillate between architectural precision and organic vulnerability. With these forms—which evoke the body, remnants of domesticity, and latent narratives of labor—the artist interrogates how materials bear traces of touch, time, and transformation. As a result, Khayat’s objects frequently linger in the liminal space between functional and sculptural, her objects flirting with what they could be—but ultimately are not—always maintaining clay’s unique capacity to hold memory and metaphor.
Khayat’s practice is deeply informed by place. She works between coastal Beirut and the mountainous region north of the city, and her sculptures evoke the organic motifs of her surroundings. Beirut is a city at crossroads, a city perpetually on the brink—of East and West, of history and future, of destruction and rebirth—and this persistent threat of cataclysm looms large in Khayat’s work. “My city,” Khayat says, “has been on the verge of collapse for most of my life. We dream, we imagine, we plan, we build—knowing that it can all disappear within a fraction of a second.” Khayat’s work embodies these contradictions—violence and calm, growth and decay, life and death.
Khayat has exhibited widely in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Her work is included in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, Mougins, France; and the Saradar Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon. Khayat has also shown her work with House of Today, an organization that supports Lebanese artists and designers. Khayat studied ceramics at the Centre de Ceramique Bonsecours, Montreal, Canada and at The Visual Arts Centre, Montreal Canada. The artist lives and works in Beirut—where she has taught ceramics since 2000—and Montreal.