Artist Statement
The work I create comes from my understanding of my identity, the places I’ve been to, and the social structures that have shaped my perspectives. Over the past ten years, I have used personal narratives to critically explore social, political, and cultural issues. For example, my piece The Search depicts cultural and historical topics that influence the life of women in Iran. In this piece, I am exploring the private and public sphere of women’s life, where the freedoms that have been lost in an Islamic régime are negotiated daily.
By exploring the relationship between my identity and social structures, my work references oppression, immigration, memory, and feminism. Cultural transmutation and acculturation have been at the center of my studio practice since the day I came to the States. My work reflects the internal psychological state that cultural changes bring. For example, my piece The Pleasure Island from 2019, is a self-portrait sculpture that embodies the process of creation, destruction, and reconstruction. The goal of this work is to demonstrate how one’s cultural identity transforms through the process of acculturation in a world filled with unknowns. Toward that end, several of my pieces play with negative and positive spaces, creating a sense of disunity and illustrating confusion using various designs, textures, mediums, colors, presence, and absence. But do not despair; a very careful observer will witness a form of growth and a season of hope and delight.
Through research I have expanded my understanding of feminism, visual culture, power, and politics and I have developed a vocabulary to express my opinions and conceptualize my work. Central to this vocabulary is my use of embroidery and old photographs. The piece Absence was a series of embroideries based on my family’s old photographs. By embroidering the negative spaces or the spaces around the figures in the pictures, I bring absence to the attention of the viewer: The disappearance of presence, the detachment, and the disconnection. The power of presence is erased due to stresses, oppression, censorship, immigration, and the taught social structures. The embroidery and the stitches metaphorize oppressions rooted in a patriarchal culture. Even though I have a very rich culture, it defines the figure of woman by the presence of men. While I was making this work I believed that the only way to be free was for my mind to become absent, disconnected, and detached from my body: my body can't escape, but my mind can.
Although my main medium is clay, I have been working and experimenting with other mediums including video, photography, embroidery, and printing. I continue to get inspiration from a list of artists working similarly to my work such as Shadi Ghadirian, who uses photography and stitching to question Iranian women’s private sphere of life. Instead of photographing my subjects during stitching a web – Like Ghadirian’s work- I opted to stitch them as part of my art practice. I believe my work is similar to William Kendrigde’s in the way that he shows absence or change by drawing series of before and after charcoal drawings. What is different is that charcoal is a flexible medium meaning it can be erased and be modified unlike photography. Immigrating and its relation and effects on memory and forgetting gave me the idea of working with old family photos in the studio and showing the memories and their presence and absence caused by displacement.
