http://golnaradili.com/home.html

Art is my key to understanding the current underlying my identity and the world through fragments, abstraction, and repetition. In doing so, I derive much of my inspiration from my own life, my father’s archive of writings, and Persian poetry.

Growing up in post-1979 Tehran, I have experienced separation, uprooting, and longing and I am compelled to decode the ways in which these events have marked me. I work in different mediums and my process at times involves deconstructing and reconstructing an image or object through cutting, folding and material manipulation referencing my segmented past.

Progressively my practice has revolved around biographical text investigating a landscape of displacement and longing through my late father’s archive. A prolific intellectual and activist, he archived much of his own history providing me with a window into his past in addition to a large body of source material to work with for years to come.

With this application I have included works on and with paper referencing letters between my parents in their first years of separation. Images 2-9 are different distortions driven by the content of the text and material experimentation.

Exploring the landscapes made of language, poetry, and emotions in these letters, I have isolated a certain letter “ye” in my father’s handwriting which registers the subtle variations in its curve (images 4 and 5). I have used these changes in the “ye’s” as an emotional diagram which I proceeded to make spatial in the installation presented in images 6 and 7.

The first and last images presented with my application reference a line of Persian poetry: A thousand pages of chest in a thousand pages of mirror. This evocative line has driven a series of iterative work all including the same image. In Persian literature the chest is a place where one stores emotions and where the sole resides, making it into a powerful symbol which I have investigated repeatedly.

I am very interested in exploring the language of the material I use. At times my work mimics digital processes while being highly hand crafted, creating juxtaposition in exploring new distortions and blurring the lines between design, craft and fine art.

I utilize simple formulas which I apply in repetition to achieve the desired expression. This meditative process imbues the pieces with time and emotional energy which I hope to transfer to the reader.