Chashm-e del #1 Drawing

Chasm-e del explores a tangible sense of love and emotion as a way of both resisting and embracing my Persian culture and linking my past to my future through the present. There is a significant body-part, del, which means, ‘heart-stomach’ in Farsi. Del is conceptualised as the container of emotions, desires, compassions and also thoughts and memories. It is very closely related to another part of the body chashm, which means, ‘eye’. Chashm is also often used to conceptualise emotion. Much Persian literature refers to chashm-e del as spiritual insight. This conceptualisation in Persian literature and Farsi has been influenced by a mystical spiritual tradition known as Sufism, a belief and a practice that seeks truth by means of love and devotion. The spiritual del is capable of seeing what the physical chashm cannot perceive. The pureness and innocence of the heart is valuable in Sufism. In my art, del is represented by the nude, which for me represents the pure and blameless. We enter the world unclothed. Before developing the ability to comprehend verbal and written language we first rely on emotional communication: crying, laughing, and so on. This first nonverbal, emotional language is carried with us through our entire lives. Within my art, this is expressed through different tones and colours combined with Persian poetry in calligraphy writing. The Farsi texts are written in a range of styles as a way of highlighting a spectrum of emotional experiences. I am inspired by the combination of colours in the world of insects, particularly butterflies which are generally perceived as symbols of the soul, love, rebirth, time and vulnerability, from which I derive my colour palette. My works are introspective, hybrid and intuitive responses to my dreams and the natural world. They capture fleeting moments of passion and awe. The nude bodies are only partially revealed, their faces averted, vulnerable and defenseless; they float through space - poetically embodying desires, fears and concerns, and revealing intense emotional struggles through my del.