Mahla (Painter)

Being born and raised in an Islamic country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, I have been immersed within the richness and diversity of historical and traditional art my entire life; it has become a part of who I am, not only as an artist but simply as a human being. The relationship between place and memory is very strong and plays a significant role in my creative practice. Discovering and connecting with personal identity is essential to my work because I use my art to bridge the gap between feelings of nostalgia and the constant search for home. My work combines a variety of technical approaches in painting and drawing, involving both additive and subtractive layering and the utilization of traditional Iranian patterns from mosaics and calligraphy, to form a visual poetry that whispers of a desire to unite memory with the search for home. For political reasons, my family left Iran when I was sixteen, but I have been entranced by tantalizing visions of home, constantly conflicted in trying to represent a home that I am prevented (or spared) from witnessing, as an Iranian woman in Canada, living in exile after a forced emigration.
In the body of work, patterns are used to represent both cultural displacement and the emotional loss of distance. In fact, having the time to imagine and re-imagine the experience of exile provides an opportunity to increase the formal clarity and the symbolic detail contained in the work. This is to recall the past and to explore a particularly Iranian (and Canadian) sense of culture identity, through layering. Rather than seeing patterns and layers as something from the collective unconscious, it would be reasonable to view these patterns as a sign of migration and displacement. Signs of distance, both cultural and literal, are noticeable throughout the scratches that have been made on the surface of the paintings. In a complex surface environment, I am loosely rendering patterns upon vertical canvases, each of which acts, metaphorically, as an individual uncovering the layers of their past. The scratches recede sharply within the plane over the other layer. What is depicted is an act of revealed memory being displaced, and, through the contrast between interior and exterior, the movement between layers speaks to the anxiety of moving through past and present.