Samina Mehar | Courtyard of Memory

Samina Mehar is an emerging Canadian ceramic artist, engineer, and former sustainability consultant whose work explores the relationship between faith, memory, identity, migration, and belonging. Through hand-built ceramics, she creates contemplative pieces that bring
contemporary design together with traditional craftsmanship. Her work draws inspiration from Islamic art, geometry, architecture, nature, and personal spiritual journeys.
Working primarily with stoneware and porcelain, Samina uses carving, impressed and layered textures, glaze, and selective gold accents to create surfaces that invite quiet reflection. Her background in engineering and sustainability influences her attention to material, structure, light, balance, and meaning. She believes ceramic objects can carry stories, preserve memories, and become vessels for deeper conversations about the human experience.
Following her recent Hajj pilgrimage, her work has increasingly explored home, impermanence, longing, healing, and spiritual return. Through Soul Meraki Life, she creates ceramic art that encourages viewers to pause, reflect, and reconnect with what they continue to carry within.

 

My ceramic practice explores the spaces where memory, faith, identity, and place intersect. I am drawn to the homes we leave behind, the homes we create, and the unseen home we continually seek.
Clay is my language because it records every touch. I work primarily with hand-built stoneware and porcelain, using carving, layered textures, glaze, and subtle gold details to create surfaces that hold beauty, fracture, and imperfection. References to Islamic geometry, architecture, calligraphy, maps, and the natural world appear within my work as quiet metaphors rather than literal illustrations. The Exhibition theme “Homes I Carried ” resonates with my experience of migration and layered belonging. Carrying memories of Pakistan while creating a life in Canada has taught me that place is not always fixed. It may exist in the body, in family, in faith, in memory, and in the values, we continue to carry. My recent Hajj pilgrimage deepened this understanding by
transforming home from a physical location into a spiritual state of nearness, surrender, and return.
Through ceramic jewellery, sculptural work, lighting, and tile compositions, I seek to create open-ended pieces that allow viewers to bring their own histories and experiences to the work. I hope my ceramics invite quiet reflection on where we come from, what remains when places change, and where our deepest sense of home resides