Illustrator Meital Shushan draws on ancient Levantine vessels, desert motifs and her Moroccan-Iraqi roots to build a contemporary visual language in which inherited forms carry memory, landscape and cultural identity into the present.
The amphora is one of the oldest containers in human history: a vessel designed to hold, to carry, to preserve across distance and time. For Meital Shushan, it is also a symbol whose logic extends far beyond the archaeological.
“I return to the vessel because it holds form, history and presence, all inside one structure,” she says. “A feminine form of containment and continuity.”
Amphora Canaan is an ongoing illustration series that begins with close study: the animals, geometric symbols and elemental marks found on early Levantine vessels, observed, distilled and reorganised into new compositions structured by symmetry and interconnected form. The work does not replicate artifacts. It absorbs their spirit and transforms it, building a visual language that carries references to desert, earth, roots and wind into contemporary illustration without losing its connection to the ancient place those references come from.
The series bridges archaeological fragments and present-day forms, proposing a renewed visual language rooted in the specificity of Canaan as a place and a cultural inheritance. Shushan’s own heritage, Moroccan and Iraqi, shapes the work as much as the historical research does: Middle Eastern and North African motifs, ancestral gestures and inherited forms reconfigured into symbolic systems that are organised and immediate at once. The symmetry she works with is not decorative but structural, reflecting the way these ancient design systems encoded meaning into balance and repetition.
Throughout the series, as across her practice more broadly, the vessel and the female figure appear as parallel structures: both understood as bearers of continuity, holding layered histories within a grounded, composed presence.
Meital Shushan is an illustrator whose visual language draws from Middle Eastern and North African motifs and the expanse of the desert, reconfiguring tradition into symbolic systems rooted in place and memory.
ARTIST LINKS
byshushan.com/personal
@meitalshushan
Amphora Canaan I–III, 2025. Digital illustration series.
