More than once since meeting him in 2015, curator Jennifer Zwilling had seen ceramic artist Ibrahim Said throw a sizable vessel in public in less than 20 minutes, leaving other accomplished ceramicists slack-jawed.

The 48-year-old Said had also demonstrated to Zwilling—at prestigious showings in select East Coast cities, during workshops and symposiums, and at the wheel—that he possessed the technical skill, “feel for the clay,” as Zwilling defines it, and wisdom to routinely realize his generative, seemingly borderless imaginings.

But the ways in which Said was beginning to define his next project, set to premier in April 2022 at The Clay Studio’s newly built, state-of-the-art building in Philadelphia? If the scheme were hatched by almost anyone else, it could’ve been dismissed as brash and ill-fated.

After all, it would ultimately involve engineering and then somehow displaying three sheets of kiln-blasted clay that were each nearly seven feet tall, two feet wide, a half inch thick, meticulously engraved, and brilliantly glazed. A feat that would require an almost superhuman understanding of the material’s molecular makeup, not to mention a saint’s patience. Which is why Zwilling, who serves as curator and director of artistic programs at The Clay Studio, decided it just might materialize. And if it didn’t, something enthralling would result regardless.

With financial support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Said and two other artists (Kukuli Velarde and Molly Hatch) were commissioned to create work for The Clay Studio’s space-christening exhibit, Making Place Matter. Said’s contribution, titled On the Bank of the Nile, finally came to fruition after three failed, time-consuming, heartbreaking attempts. And it is, as Zwilling anticipated, even more stunning than the original concept.

“One of the things about us being able to give him funding is that it allowed him the space to experiment. He’s brave enough and skilled enough to take risks,” she says. “After trying again and again, and [the work] breaking every time, he actually pushed even further. You only do that if you have incredible knowledge and deep understanding. You need that much-talked-about ten thousand hours. And he passed that a long time ago.”

Bustling Beginnings
At the age of 6, Said began visiting his father’s humming ceramics studio in Fustat, a neighborhood in Cairo that was the first Muslim capital of Egypt before being absorbed by the larger city; it remains renowned for its titanic, high-octane commercial pottery industry. “I was always playing around in there. It would make my mother crazy,” Said says, animated by the memory. “Seeing all the pottery and forms that people made was very important for my development. It was my college. It was my art school.”

The family business demanded speed and concision. By the time he was a teenager, Said says he was throwing so many pots in so little time he came to briefly loathe the wheel’s potential for mass production, preferring to hand-build and hand-carve the clay whenever possible. His father supported these impulses in his son—without necessarily intending to—by occasionally letting the “production cycle” lapse and lingering over a detail or a distinctive flourish in his own work. It was a practice that made his studio a hangout for groundbreaking makers. “My father had a lot of artist friends,” Said says. “Over the years, many people would come to him to help do something on the wheel. So I saw what artists were thinking and how their ideas were growing.”

At the same time, the maturing Said consistently found himself enchanted by his surroundings: The traditional Egyptian architecture, exemplified by the oldest mosque in Africa, which he walked past most every day of his adolescence. The geometric patterns and arabesques typical of the Islamic art that crowded his favorite museums and everyday haunts. The smell of wood fire in the air. The dust from marble and granite quarries.

“Egyptians are really rich in culture,” says Said, who emphasizes that what he’s referring to transcends any particular type of carving or design. “It’s more than that. It’s the culture I lived. It’s a feeling that comes from daily rituals. . . . It shaped me and it shaped my world.”

With the full-voiced encouragement and material support of his proud father, Said left Egypt for the first time in 2002 to attend a craft fair in Belgium. The experience convinced him to further explore his passions, including specific types of Egyptian pottery, such as the vase forms from the Naqada III period in Egypt (3200 to 3000 BCE), as well as broader creative concepts involving storytelling, tradition, and remembrance.

A decade later—after participating in competitions and showcases in Qatar, Spain, Oman, Kuwait, and Shanghai—Said emigrated to Greensboro, North Carolina. “It’s a really incredible town,” says Said’s wife, the painter and art professor Mariam Stephan. “It’s big enough and small enough. It’s a really rich community, where artists can stay and grow.”

Seen and Unseen
Before leaving Fustat, which he now visits once or twice a year, Said found himself pushing boundaries out of necessity. “In Egypt, artwork is often copied. You’d find your piece in a show before you’ve even made it,” he says. “I would make myself do work that would be so hard to copy, so daring, that I hoped those who might take my ideas would think it easier to make something of their own.”