Samah Shihadi has built a body of work around Palestinian food, capturing unassuming scenes of cooking, eating, and sharing ameal. For Shihadi, food acts as an emotional anchor to communicate experiences of lost identity and collective memory. In this drawing, which almost registers as a photograph, an elderly Palestinian woman sits on her living room floor rolling dough. Carefully bending over to pick up a lump of dough, she conveys a sense of care and thoughtfulness around the act of preparing food, an attentiveness mirrored in Shihadi’s own detailed approach to her subject. Shihadi was born in 1987 in Sha'b, a small Palestinian village, and since childhood has worked with pencil and paper to create her compelling photorealistic drawings.
