Weaving the memory Collage

Farina Salehi currently lives in Australia. She is an emerging artist currently studying her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. She completed her undergraduate degree in Shiraz and also has a Masters in Fine Arts from Azad University, Tehran. She has participated in many group exhibitions in Iran and Australia and has her works in private collections throughout Iran. Farina's artistic practice is predominately oil painting and mixed media. She is influenced by the woven textiles of the nomadic people of Shiraz. Her paintings attempt to negotiate the traditional Eastern patterns with Western notions of abstraction. Farina is currently living and working in Sydney. Her works are mainly oil paint with a focus on mixed media, and various types of textiles, wool and some collected objects on canvas. The size of her paintings are usually 120cm x 120cm and 150cm x 120cm and there is a reason behind that. While living and studying in Shiraz she became familiar with the hand woven textiles of nearby nomadic people and the table cloths they used are always square or rectangular shaped. Sitting around this "sofreh" or table cloth while sharing a meal is an important aspect of communication and familial relations. For Farina each artwork she creates is simultaneously an extension her culture and bridging the past and future as she attempts to connect her shifting identity in a diasporic experience of living far from her homeland. Her Masters research explores the structural and cultural references of texture and pattern in relation to pure abstraction. She experiments with cutting the canvas and building up really thick layers with textiles, treating the painting like a collage. She describes her work as: "the seduction of the surface, the vibrant colours, draw the viewer into the event of perception at the surface of the painting. This is reminiscent of issues taken up in modernist colour field painting: the holding of patches of colour that seduce the viewer."