Clay keeps the record

For the past six years, clay has been my sanctuary. It began as a distant childhood memory — the joy of first touching clay in kindergarten — and came back to me during one of the hardest chapters of my life. When the world paused in 2020, I finally had room for a longing I had carried through seven years of academia. I bought my first twenty kilos of clay, found a wheel on Kijiji, and drove two hours with friends to pick up a kiln. Those endless hours at the wheel, day and night, became my meditation.

I build slowly and mostly by hand — coiling, pinching, throwing when the form asks for it. Clay is the only material I know that keeps a record of the pressure that shaped it. A thumbprint stays a thumbprint. A moment of hesitation stays visible in the wall of a pot. I stopped trying to correct that and started building for it.

My work sits between vessel and figure: faces, serpents, and jars that are meant to be used as much as met. I keep returning to a narrow palette — oxblood and burgundy for heat, turquoise for water, gold at the seams where something broke and was rejoined rather than hidden.

The name comes from the Simurgh, the bird of Persian myth that burns and returns, older each time. It is a good description of what a kiln does. You surrender the piece to a temperature you cannot negotiate with, and what comes out is not what you put in.

Creating without pressure to perform, without expectation, without audience — that is where my making finally bloomed. Teaching is not separate from it. Watching someone touch clay for the first time returns me to why I started.

Biography

Saēna Jalalzadeh is a ceramic artist based in Toronto, working from a studio at Monty's Creative Studio on Queen Street East. She holds a BA in Psychology from York University and trained in acting and live performance at Toronto Film School, and has kept a ceramics practice for over six years — hand-building, wheel throwing, carving and glazing.

Her work has been shown and sold at Toronto markets including the Queer Art Market and East End Kids Pride. She facilitates weekly Clay Play sessions at Monty's Creative Studio — wheel throwing, hand building, and decoration and glazing — and makes both functional tableware and one-of-a-kind sculptural pieces, taking a small number of commissions each year.

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