Darfur’s Pottery: An Interview with Professor Mohamed Rashid

In an interview with Voices of Darfur, Mohamed Rashid talks about the tools and techniques of making handcrafted ceramics, and about his love for a craft that may soon become a lost art.

By Ala Mayyahi

Born in North Darfur in 1957, Dr. Mohamed Rashid has been living most of his life in El Fasher, the town where he grew up, and now teaches graduate students at the local university. While Dr. Rashid has explored all types of artistic media over the years, including painting and fabric design, he favours working with clay.

His love of pottery and his experience with the art dates to his university days in Khartoum. In 1985, Dr. Rashid was granted a scholarship to the University of Sudan, where he obtained a degree in fine arts with a concentration in ceramics. He continued on to receive a Ph.D. in education.

Dr. Rashid has displayed his art in several exhibitions across Sudan, including in El Fasher, Khartoum, Nyala and Um Kadada. He says that nature landscape has been his main source for inspiration, and making pottery with colourful glazes has been his passion since he first began to work in the medium.

In an interview with Voices of Darfur, Dr. Rashid talked about the tools and techniques of making handcrafted ceramics, and about his love for a craft that may soon become a lost art.

Voices of Darfur: You’ve experimented with more than one art, but you clearly favour ceramics. What drives you most to this medium?

Rashid: Working with clay and shaping it while it’s still tender. The glazes fascinate me when they come out of the oven shiny. That moment gives me joy. But I feel sad when some of them get cracked. Making ceramic is a long and tiring process. Some pieces take 15 days to be completed. When a piece gets broken, that means all the effort made for it is wasted. But the beautiful pieces pay for the tiresome moments, and this motivates me to continue to make more..

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Read the full interview in the September issue of Voices of Darfur. Download the magazine (PDF) here.