I first encountered a Rawan Sirry sculpture not in a gallery, but on a screen – a glossy rectangle resembling a chocolate box, glinting under a ring light, so irresistibly edible that my thumb instinctively swiped to double-tap. It was, of course, entirely inedible: polymer clay or mixed media, and a dusting of something that caught the light like crushed diamonds. And it was titled, with a wink I’d come to adore, ‘Ceci n’est pas un chocolat’. Magritte, ‘The Treachery of Images’, the famous pipe – yes, all of it. But also a declaration: beneath the seductive surface, you would find no sugar, only questions.
Some weeks later, I find myself at one of her exhibitions, surrounded by rows of these exquisite fictions. There are lips, hyperreal and lacquered, studded with pearls or menaced by gold spikes. Doughnuts glazed in nostalgia. Love boxes that look as though they were stolen from a Viennese confiserie by way of a Surrealist séance. The air smells faintly of nothing at all, which is disorienting because my brain keeps insisting on vanilla, cacao and the caramelised crunch of a Crunchie bar. This is Sirry’s gentle trap: beauty as invitation, followed by the slow, unsettling recognition that you are not being fed. You are being felt.
“I started because my daughter handed me a piece of brown clay,” she tells me, cradling a work in progress that resembles a bite of something celestial. “I shaped it into what looked like chocolate. It was instinctive. Healing.” For fifteen years prior, Sirry had worked in graphic design and advertising – industries that reward repeatability, logic and the safe path. The clay spoke a different language. It cracked, misbehaved and guided her hands away from perfection and towards something far more luxurious: truth.
This philosophy of imperfection is woven into every fingerprint she leaves behind. In an age when a well-worded prompt can summon a passable Monet in seconds, Sirry’s sculptures arrive with the full weight of the human hand. An asymmetry in a petal. A texture that recalls a thumbprint. These are not flaws; they are certificates of origin. “A 3D-printed object will never move me the way a handmade Fabergé egg does,” she says. “One carries the presence, patience and soul of the person who made it.” It is a statement that doubles as an investment thesis. The market for genuine craftsmanship – the kind that cannot be duplicated by machine or code – has become the quiet obsession of connoisseurs from Palm Jumeirah to Avenue Foch. In a world drowning in digital seamlessness, the fingerprint is the new hallmark.
Sirry’s own hallmarks are the product of a gloriously scattered geography. Born in London to Lebanese and Palestinian parents and educated in Switzerland, she has absorbed the visual dialects of several continents. The Swiss Style – championed by the great graphic designers of the mid-twentieth century, with its mantra of clarity, balance and less-is-more – lodged itself in her bones. You can see it in the way a single glossy lip floats in a void of negative space, or in the way a chocolate box is reduced to its essential geometry. Yet the palette is pure Levant by way of Mayfair: milky rose, saffron gold and the deep, lacquered crimson of a Louboutin sole. She is, in essence, a global nomad who sculpts in a language that needs no translation: desire.
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Desire, and its twin, restraint. The lips, which have become her most recognisable motif, are not merely Pop objects. They bristle with spikes. “They’re about speaking up, finding your voice,” she explains, “and protecting yourself from negativity. The spikes act like a shield, reflecting back only positivity.” In a culture that has made the female mouth a site of endless augmentation and interpretation, this is bracingly intelligent work. It is a universal portrait of longing, yes, but also a psychological self-portrait of an artist who spent years in advertising knowing when to stay quiet. Now she lets the clay speak – and it does so with a gilded vocabulary.
One of the quiet joys of our conversation is discovering Sirry’s relationship with failure. She never sketches. “It probably sounds a little mad, but I feel the clay talks to me.” Mistakes are not erased; they are honoured. A crack becomes a new technique. A failed colour leads to an entirely different series. And the pieces that do not make it? They are not destroyed. They live in a cabinet she calls her “archive of ugliness”, physical proof of artistic evolution. It is a disarmingly confident move, the kind that makes you wish more luxury houses would open a wing dedicated to their misfires.
When she first approached galleries, she was told she was too old, had not struggled enough and did not fit the archetype of the tortured talent. She tells me this with a gracious smile, the kind that knows the joke is on them. Within six months of going independent, she had sold out her entire collection via Instagram. “Social media gave me a direct connection to the people who genuinely connect with my work.” No white cube, no middleman – just a direct message and a shipping crate. It is a very 2026 sort of success story and yet utterly timeless: an artist finding her patrons by virtue of the work alone.
What makes a Sirry sculpture feel so collectible, aside from its immaculate finish, is its insistence on intimacy. These are not monumental installations designed to dwarf the viewer. They are handheld, precious and jewel-like. “A diamond doesn’t become more precious because it’s the size of a car,” she notes. “In many ways, its rarity and intimacy are what make it special.” The work invites you to lean in, to discover the tiny bubble trapped in mixed media, the one stray fleck of glitter that catches the light just so. In a world of 200-inch screens and immersive everything, this is counter-programming of the highest order. It is art as a whisper, not a shout.
As our time winds down, I ask her what she hopes someone will see in her work fifty years from now, when context has faded. “I hope they don’t see them as objects about chocolate, temptation or beauty,” she says. “I hope they see them as reminders that human beings were still searching for joy, connection, wonder and meaning. Those emotions are timeless.”
I walk out into the thick Dubai afternoon, the skyline shimmering like one of her glazes. On my phone, I notice that I have been following her account for over a year. It occurs to me that I have never once looked away from a Sirry piece without a faint, inexplicable craving. Not for sugar, but for something far more elusive: the feeling of being understood by an object that cannot be consumed, only cherished.
And that, I think, is the most elegant trick of all.
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