Amelia Waliany (aka Ectopyaar) is a Pakistani-American sculptor and ceramicist who’s work enfolds clay, the body, and the unseen. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she came to making early, through drawing, music, and movement. She began working with ceramics in 2013 in Brooklyn and hasn't stopped since, deepening her practice across New York, San Francisco, and now Lisbon, where she lives and creates.
Working primarily in handbuilding, Amelia creates sculptural forms that hold traces of anatomy and energetic systems, biomorphic growth, myth, and devotional making.
As a practicing somatic facilitator, her work draws equally from somatic experience and material memory: the breath mid-exhale, a doodle line that veers unexpectedly, the way ocean current and shifting light both move through one's body.
co-founding Golden Joinery, a trauma-informed ceramics project in New York offering therapeutic clay hand-building workshops to survivors of traumatic brain injuries; and exhibiting at venues including Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. Rooted in Islamic wisdom and the aesthetics of wabi-sabi, her work honors what has been made before while opening space for something newly alive to emerge.