My favorite surface is of the piece Hold at Armpit Level, it's a couple of casts of a car-seat booster for minors. I didn't expect the original texture to turn out to be as rich as it did. The object completely transformed. I installed each cast facing the other with the safety belts almost touching each other; it feels very human yet industrial.

The objects become sculptures when they change their original function, whether it's through casting, which changes their status in the world, or through decontextualization when they are installed in a show, but return to their original function when it's deinstalled.

When I am casting my objects in ceramic, I try my best to avoid cracks, as cracks feel like a cliché - ceramics can crack, and that's part of what the material does - there is much more tension in the potential of a crack before it actually happens. Yet, a crack is interesting if it's unintentional, and it functions as evidence of the perfection process. I try my best to have a perfect cast, yet I fail to achieve one. Whether the cracked object is an interesting sculpture or not is a hard decision to make because I have to decide if it goes beyond the cliché.

In the last few years, I have worked with a range of materials like ceramics, plastics and resins, concrete, and steel. I don't know if I trust any material, as I always question my choices for each new project. I tend to choose ceramic again and again, not because of comfort, but because each project I make creates new challenges and questions I want to deal with in the next one. Yet it's not settled for me; I still experiment with other materials and consider other techniques before each project. I am not a ceramic sculptor; I am a sculptor who uses ceramic.

It's a great question because I moved to the USA for an MFA program at VCU, and school felt like a bubble that exploded immediately after graduation into a pandemic and barely any art opportunities at the time. It was a job I had between residencies, when I didn't have the papers for a better job. I chose a location outside of the city to avoid meeting anyone I knew. There is shame in the job. Nobody wants to do it; it requires zero qualifications. But that's what made it interesting for me: suddenly, I wasn't Abed Shalabi the artist, but some brown immigrant whom people didn't expect to speak good English. I enjoyed the job because I met many people I wouldn't have met in the art bubble, like local lottery addicts, school bus drivers, and single moms in Cookie Monster pajama pants.

When I think of how my sculptures deal with questions about cultural and technological progress, I don’t claim to have a deeply researched analysis of change, but I am interested in what the change feels like. Growing up in the 90s, I was obsessed with the idea of a new millennium, and so many of the new technologies that changed my life are now ancient or taken for granted. During my time as an art student, I struggled with whether my practice needed to engage directly with emerging technologies like social media. That pressure ultimately pushed me in the opposite direction, toward physical materials, clay, casting, and processes rooted in touch and labor. When so many of the images we consume are digital, these methods begin to feel unexpectedly radical. One of the interesting things to follow is failed technologies, like the push by Meta and Apple into AR/VR devices and the fatigue that surrounds them. There is something exhausting about the constant push for innovation; so much effort is invested in producing change, yet we seem to feel less and less excited by it.

For me, it's not about cars as brands but about the car as the perfect technological extension of the human body. Almost everyone can be a driver. I started creating work related to car culture before I had a driving license myself. I was fascinated by how universal car culture is and how acceptable it is for us to take the risk of driving. On the road, death is very close, yet everyone drives in impressive sync.

There is something almost post-apocalyptic and threatening about isolated objects when they are removed from their original context. I think casting them in ceramic places the work within a longer timeline of human creation and opens the possibility of these objects being encountered in the future as archaeological remains. For me, control is about what I choose to include, where I place the focus, and what narratives and experiences the objects I choose are able to memorize.

I love starting my studio day at Home Depot or Lowe’s. It makes me feel like a construction worker in a way that makes me feel like my practice is adding something useful to the world. It feels grounded and down-to-earth, and I enjoy it much more than buying specialized art supplies. I’ve also worked extensively with 3M reflective sheets, and I know a lot about sign-making and reflective lighting. I hope to soon have the budget to bring this knowledge into the work more effectively.

My time at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in summer 2022 was definitely the most meaningful for me as an artist, mostly because of the timing; it was my first program after my MFA, and right when things started to open after the pandemic. I feel like I may have given up making art if I hadn't gotten that validation, because during the residency, you really feel like an artist, you have no worries but making art, and that's a very unique situation.

I strongly believe in the power of physical labor in art-making. So much of modern technology is created through hand labor that is designed to be invisible, yet as an artist, the visibility of the “artist’s hand” allows this human touch to become something radical and emotional, going against industrial and digital design.

I did a lot of traveling this spring, saw my family after two years, and visited my village, Iksal, a small village near the historic Palestinian city of Nazareth. It is a place full of contradictions and limits, both personal and political. I have been thinking a lot about how I can make work about my hometown, though I am still figuring it out.

Additionally, I spent the last year in Richmond working in an acute healthcare facility as an art therapist. I learned a lot there about human behavior, mental health, and what I call “shitty life syndrome” - people trapped in impossible situations with very little support. There were moments when art therapy allowed people to become unexpectedly open and vulnerable, and those moments stayed with me. At the same time, working inside a for-profit institution targeting homeless people, survivors of trafficking, and extremely poor patients exposed me to a very ugly side of America. I’m still thinking about how that experience can impact my studio work.

Buying tools I don't need.