This project is a personal and architectural exploration of identity, inheritance, and transformation across time, space, and material. Structured around four hand-carved wooden panels and a series of freehand drawings, the work serves as both a narrative and a spatial archive of memory. Rooted in my Kuwaiti ancestry, descended from maritime traders known as nawakhtha, the project investigates how identity is carried, reshaped, and re-authored across generations.
The journey begins with inherited names—bint il-nuwakhtha, bint Jibla, bint tujar—which spoke of a past tied to sea trade, pre-oil geographies, and familial professions. These names, though once distant and abstract, became the catalyst for a deeper search into belonging and authorship. Living abroad deepened the distance I felt from my family’s past and pushed me to find new ways of reconnecting to this legacy. Material became the means: Wood, once traded by my ancestors to build doors, ships, and windows, was reimagined as a medium of dialogue rather than construction.
Each wooden panel marks a chapter: the first recalls ancestral rootedness in Jibla; the second grapples with inherited tension and distance; the third traces my own migration and transformation through education in America; and the fourth returns in gratitude, forging a conversation across generations. Through carving, staining, and storytelling, I reclaim wood not as cargo, but as a tool of connection.
Rather than preserving the past, this project engages it, carving meaning into absence, transforming inherited weight into gestures of authorship. Each piece is a threshold, an invitation to cross.
