Hania Jneid

Hania Jneid creates objects for fragile memory. Her practice moves across ceramics, lighting, painting and furniture design — not as separate disciplines but as a single obsession expressed in different materials and at different scales. Each piece is an attempt to give physical form to what memory cannot hold on its own: the weight of inherited opulence, the quality of light through a carved screen, the feeling of a mother’s hands, the way a child sees colour before language tells them what it means.

The opulence in her work is not decorative. It is cultural memory — the richness of a Middle Eastern visual inheritance that carries within it centuries of craft, geometry, and the understanding that beauty is not a luxury but a form of dignity. This is where her work begins, regardless of where it ends up. Her lamps carry the memory of light. Rooted in the arabesque and the geometric shadow-play of Middle Eastern interiors, they transform any room they enter — throwing patterns that the body recognises before the mind does. They bring a specific quality of light, ancient and opulent, into contemporary spaces far from its source. For those who know that light, the recognition is immediate and wordless. For those who don’t, something in them understands it anyway.

Her naive vases hold the memory of self. Hand-built, imperfect, alive in the way only handmade things are — they are objects that look like childhood feels. Tender, unresolved, full of a feeling that has no name but that the body remembers. They are vessels for the earliest memories. The ones that formed you before you knew you were being formed.

Her paintings and ceramic objects look at the world through a child’s eye — unfiltered, bold, satirical in the way that only real tenderness can be satirical. They are not naive. They are a conscious decision to keep seeing before the world’s categories close in. The lips, the bold colour, the deliberate imperfection — these are acts of resistance as much as acts of making.

Her sculptural furniture holds the memory of images — old photographs, inherited interiors, the forms of a past that was never directly lived but that arrived through other people’s hands. These are pieces you can inhabit, rooms that remember, structures built from the residue of someone else’s story becoming your own.

The Emotional Lab — her most ambitious work — is where all of this becomes explicit. A chemistry laboratory reimagined as an interior, a space where feeling is processed, distilled and given form. It is the methodology made visible: memory as experiment, transformation as practice, the invisible made inhabitable.

Jneid works between Beirut and Barcelona. Both cities live in her work — one as origin and opulence, one as distance and light. The tension between them is not a contradiction. It is the material.

Hania Jneid holds an MA in Interior Design from the Royal College of Art, London.