Meirav Ong

Artist Statement

I work with textiles, clay, sound, performance, and social practice to deepen my understanding of grief, intimacy, and embodied prayer. Rooted in ancestral heritage and somatic processes, my work engages with inherited materials (physical and spiritual), communal encounters, and embodied gestures. I create immersive spaces that invite listening, witnessing, and emotional release through installations, workshops, and participatory activations with work that centers caretaking, domestic labor, and the transformative power of shared ritual.

My practice is process oriented, a meditation on the physical and emotional weight of what we carry and the intimacies of grief as it shows up in materials. Materials hold power because touch holds power. Cloth carries stories, memories, love, and caretaking—blankets that keep us warm, bedsheets that hold both softness and eroticism, dishtowels that absorb mess. The act of absorbing the mess is caretaking, and tending to fabric becomes a reciprocal practice of care and gratitude. This attentiveness to material is embodied making as a form of inquiry.

The works I create are often post-performance ritual objects—artifacts of physical and emotional processes. The labor of my practice—carrying, holding, tearing, twisting, dyeing, winding, wrapping, tying, bundling, wrestling, listening, surrendering—allows me to oscillate between tenderness and anger, from simply being with the materials, to tearing as an expression of hurt, and returning to caretaking through weaving. When I weave, I attend to repetition and accumulation, thinking about how many times each thread passes through my fingers, knotting and unknotting, transmuting material weight into forms that can hold the body again.