The tapestries and sculptural installation In Dawn to Dusk explore landscape, pictorial notions of perspective, and hand weaving and embroidery practices as carriers of personal and emotional meaning. Gholizadeh's tapestries, which typically follow a square or rectangular format, are inspired by the Iranian artist's experience of looking out through windows at landscapes that spur memories of her past life in Tehran combined with observations derived from her present locale.
Azadeh Gholizadeh's works explore the body, landscape, and the fragmentation of memory through an examination of her own emotional connection to a sense of belonging. She is interested in thinking about the relationship of landscape to memory in a manner described by Simon Schama as "a way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have … instead of being yet another explanation of what we have lost, it is an exploration of what we may find" (1).
The tapestries and sculptural installation In Dawn to Dusk explore landscape, pictorial notions of perspective, and hand weaving and embroidery practices as carriers of personal and emotional meaning. Gholizadeh's tapestries, which typically follow a square or rectangular format, are inspired by the Iranian artist's experience of looking out through windows at landscapes that spur memories of her past life in Tehran combined with observations derived from her present locale. When she is weaving or embroidering, she generally adheres to a framework of horizontal and vertical lines so that the final results appear pixelated as if looking at an image that's been zoomed in so closely, it has lost resolution and clarity. When viewed up close, the individual units, like "pixels," become clear, but the overall composition is abstracted. "This is how I reflect on the idea of home," Gholizadeh explains. "[It is something that is] fragile, inconsistent, and perspectival."
Gholizadeh's process begins by making a collaged image combining different viewpoints, flatness, and depths into a single plane. Then, based on structure of lines and patterns evinced in the collage study, along with inspiration from Islamic geometric patterns found in Persian gardens and mosques she studied while practicing architecture in Iran, Gholizadeh uses yarn and canvas mesh to embroider the tapestries, staying within a framework of horizontal and vertical lines so that the final results appear pixelated.
Trees are a recurring motif in Dawn to Dusk. "I like looking at trees to explore how absence and distance, desire and a longing for that which is absent can become a form of endurance" and emotional pain can be transformed into an ongoing conversation between past and present. "I use elements from nature such as clouds, mountain peaks, forests, and leaves because they give me comfort and a sense of refuge. They resonate because one or more components awaken some of my memories, and when all are combined, create a new view."
1. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995, New York: A.A. Knopf), pg. 14.