Gaza: Precious Lives, Stolen Dreams

Ceramicist Mary McKone and community members seek to bring awareness with a growing installation of thousands of ceramic figurines that represent only a portion of the children killed in Gaza. The installation features a poem by her son Rami Azzam.

Thousands of children killed in Gaza.
Images of their small bodies in white shrouds haunt us.
Precious lives, gone in an instant.
Stolen smiles.  
Stolen dreams. 

How can we stay silent?

Mary McKone is a small-batch potter based in Georgetown, Maine. Learn more about Mary at her website and Instagram. Her work is also on view through June 8th at the Chocolate Church Arts Center in Bath in “3 X 3 Art Exhibition: Three Artists, Three Media.” Mary is currently organizing other ceramicists to contribute to this project in adding more figurines to the installation. If they choose to be named, we will update this page.

Mary started her ceramics career working as a production potter in the late 1970s for Christian Ridge Pottery in South Paris, Maine. From 1985-94 she moved to Ramallah in the West Bank to be the art instructor at the Friends Girls’ School. Toward the end of her work there she participated in multiple group exhibitions in Ramallah and East Jerusalem and worked as a ceramicist for six years at Green Door Pottery in Ramallah. From 1988 through 1996 she worked in Ruth Ombegho’s pottery studio in Ikon, Lagos, Nigeria, then taught and practiced ceramics from 1996-2006 in Cairo, Egypt, and later finished her time abroad working as the International Baccalaureate Visual Arts Instructor at the American Community School in Beirut. In 2016, she and her husband Fateh Azzam moved back to Georgetown, Maine, where she established her own studio, McKone Pottery.