Words by Allegra Salvadori

For Dana Kamal, porcelain is not a fragile material. It is a truth-teller.

Her relationship with clay began unexpectedly, with what was meant to be a handmade gift. “The moment my hands touched the clay, I felt instantly connected to myself,” she recalls. Smooth, white, and limitless, porcelain revealed itself as both medium and mirror — a blank canvas capable of holding memory, emotion, and intent. “The gift I was making became a gift for me,” she says, marking the beginning of a practice shaped as much by introspection as by craft.

Kamal’s work oscillates between birds, flowers, corals, and intuitive figurative forms — each exploring the tension between vulnerability and resilience. Porcelain, she explains, is often misunderstood: perceptually delicate, yet scientifically among the strongest clay bodies. “It embodies the idea that something can be simultaneously resilient and delicate,” she notes, much like the natural forms she sculpts — hollow-boned birds crossing continents, flowers blooming through cracks, corals surviving hostile seas.

Her studio practice unfolds in quiet ritual. Coffee, music, order. Then hours of rolling, pressing, shaping — hundreds of petals formed one by one. The repetition becomes meditative, a state of flow where “nothing exists but me and my clay.” Alongside this precision sits a freer, more emotional language: figurative works shaped intuitively, often during moments of personal difficulty. These pieces, she says, are “a snapshot of how I feel in that moment,” finished not through perfection, but acceptance.

As her practice expands in scale, Kamal dreams beyond objects. She imagines environments built from thousands of porcelain elements — spaces where fragility whispers and strength quietly commands. If her work were music, she says, it would not be a single song but a shifting playlist: melodic and rhythmic at times, raw and vocal at others. What matters most is not genre, but connection — the ability to make the viewer feel.