Introduction: A Tapestry Breathing Memory

Palestinian artist Dina Nazmi Khorchid stands at a powerful intersection where memory, landscape, and loss converge. Her practice transforms nature into a witness, textiles into an emotional architecture, and water into a shifting mirror of histories—personal and collective. Through weaving, print, and layered materials, she maps a terrain shaped by displacement, longing, and the fragile idea of home.

Nature as Witness, Nature as Wound

For Dina, nature is not simply idyllic or contemplative — it is deeply emotional. Trees, water, smoke, and soil become participants in grief and regeneration. In her recent works, especially The Color I Hate the Most is Rubble & Smoke, she captures trauma through pigment, torn threads, and darkened hues. Inspired by the Beirut explosion and images of destruction from Gaza to California wildfires, she interprets the environment as a mirror for internal rupture.

In her world, nature suffers alongside humans; it absorbs memory, records silence, and holds the weight of unspoken grief.

Ghostly Trees: Between Stability and Disappearance

In the Land, Untitled series, trees take on an ethereal, almost spectral quality. These submerged trees—solid yet wavering—become metaphors for survival under pressure. They stand tall but ripple in water, representing the tension between rootedness and vulnerability.

Dina’s fascination with trees is partly emotional, partly symbolic:
they represent continuity, shadow, and the fragile thread between presence and erasure.

Water as Archive: Fluid Memory and Migration

Water appears repeatedly in her visual language — a symbol both comforting and dangerous. It is a refuge, but also a force tied to migration and exile.

Her work Estuary explores the point where freshwater and saltwater meet, a fleeting moment of convergence. Two ripples almost touch, hinting at a longing for unity and liberation. This fluid tension mirrors the Palestinian experience: memory that drifts, erases, resurfaces, and insists on returning.

Textiles: Carrying What Cannot Be Left Behind

Dina’s textile work emphasizes tactility and embodied memory.
Fabric, she believes, is one of the few belongings refugees can carry with them. In Palestinian culture especially, textiles hold familial stories, identity markers, and symbols of protection.

She often layers new weavings over older ones, allowing hidden textures to remain beneath the surface. This gesture speaks to the buried histories that shape her identity—histories that are never fully erased.

Working with Absence: Responding to Lost Paintings

Her participation in The Lost Paintings exhibition sparked an emotional exploration of disappearance. Responding to the erased works of Palestinian-Lebanese artist Maroun Tomb, who lost his entire 1947 exhibition during the Nakba, she engaged deeply with themes of erasure and recovery.

Choosing the title Under the Oak Tree, she sought the symbolism of shelter, wisdom, and resilience. Her final piece, woven onto the back of a previous Jacquard work, became a quiet act of reclamation — layering past and present in one shared fabric.

Home as Emotion, Not Geography

For Dina, home is not a single place. It is:

• a feeling of safety

• a memory carried through traditions

• the rhythm of weaving

• the presence of loved ones

As a Palestinian refugee who has lost her home twice, she defines home as something rebuilt continually, in studios, friendships, and cultural rituals rather than physical geography.

Towards a Meditative Future

Her current research focuses on the connection between humans and the environment, particularly through slow, contemplative hand-weaving. She is exploring how color, material, and repetition can rebuild fractured memory.

Her artistic path moves toward one essential question:
How can weaving recreate a place that no longer exists?