Tender Stems is a copper sculpture that grows from the same exploration of a grief garden as Heavy Petals, Kassisieh's monumental installation, first commissioned for the Islamic Biennale in Jeddah in 2025. This earlier work took the form of atrophied steel roses made in response to a photographic archive showing her late grandmother Claudette's world of floral motifs.

In Tender Stems, the work arrives in a more intimate register: a single wreath, radiating outward from a knot of tangled stems, leaves and buds dispersed to the edges as if mid-fall, mid-exhale. The form is both ancient and unresolved, a crown, a threshold, a site of mourning, held in suspension between bloom and decay, between recognition and the lack thereof.

The shift from steel to copper is political and embodied. Copper is a living material: it oxidises, accumulates patina, and holds the temperature of whatever surrounds it. The artist's investment in the material began through prior work with copper yarn and sheet, drawn to its heat conductivity as an ethics of proximity, a metal that cannot pretend to be cold, that stays warm with contact, that registers what it has been near. In a practice rooted in dispossession and inaccessible memory, this capacity to retain and transmit warmth becomes a form of resistance against erasure.

Drawing on Bayo Akomolafe's proposition that flowers bloom because of grief, that it is instability and excess, the growing beyond what can be held, that forces the petal open, Tender Stems refuses mourning as end. Presented here in the exhibition Nor Here, Nor There, the work is a microcosm of the exhibition itself, with an essence that does not resolve. Instead, Tender Stems holds meaning open and keeps reaching beyond.