Faculty of Design

Material Art & Design

Natasha Tobias Cliche

Connective Tissue

Connective Tissue is a textile-based exploration of my Lebanese identity and relationship to food. As a third-generation Arab Canadian, I feel most connected to my heritage when participating in food traditions that my family has preserved despite decades of assimilation. Embracing food as a means of cultural connection has also been instrumental in healing my relationship with eating, something I celebrate in this work. This installation is composed of cotton cloth naturally dyed with pomegranate and onion skins; items commonly found in the Lebanese kitchen. It features silkscreen-printed fragments of an email in which my late grandfather casually passed down a recipe for marinated lamb skewers (lahm meshwi) to my mother. For over ten years, she has kept a printed copy of this email in her kitchen, her fingerprints and spills on the page creating a visual narrative of care. This is the only recipe in our family to have been documented; the others are preserved only by the memories and hands of my loved ones. At the centre of the composition is a large-scale self-portrait in which I am eating lahm meshwi, prepared according to my grandfather’s instructions. Through this act, I illustrate my family’s embodied approach to cultural preservation and confront the food shame shaped by Western ideals around body image and eating. Connective Tissue sheds light on the bicultural experience and resists assimilation by preserving ephemeral, intergenerational knowledge in cloth.