Exile of the Olive Tree’s

Rooted in the ancient olive groves of Jerusalem's Valley of the Cross, Exile of the Olive Trees traces the migration of a symbol that binds the peoples of the Levant across borders and generations.

Through 3D scanning, generative modelling, and clay printing, the work uproots these monumental trees from their soil and replants them — transformed yet unmistakable — in a London gallery, asking what survives when landscape becomes data and data becomes earth again.

I 3D-scanned ancient olive trees in Jerusalem's Valley of the Cross — the groves I grew up alongside — and used generative processes to derive new forms from them, materialised through clay 3D printing. The resulting objects sit between botanical record and digital artefact, between the site-specific and the displaced.

Presented at the Hangar Gallery in Battersea, the work brought a deeply Levantine symbol to a London audience. The olive tree is a rare point of emotional consensus across the Middle East — an emblem of rootedness, endurance, and rupture. By digitising these trees and reconstituting them thousands of miles from their source, the work performs the very exile it names.