Ahvaz Garden Collage

I am an Iran born artist based in London. My work is mainly based on weaving archival photographs together with a focus on the wider concepts of memory and cultural identity. I explore how memory of our experiences can contribute to our perceived identities. I apply the interwoven images to birch plywood surfaces that are then sanded and varnished, resulting in a three-dimensional object. Weaving has become synonymous with my practice, becoming a motif within my work. The process of physically manipulating portraits allows me to explore the relationship between form, colour and surface to illustrate my ideas on memory. I attempt to describe the memories of people and the weavings are a pictorial description of the memory process. Photography for me is the documentation of who we are, what we do; a record of a moment in time. While the photographic medium is the starting point of my practice, I experiment with image manipulation to better illustrate my ideas concerning cross-cultural perspectives on identity.