About me

For the last six years, I have been working on the idea of transforming Old Persian poetry into visual concepts and forms.

I first became acquainted with Persian poetry when I was a child and my father used to wake me up every morning with a happy rhyme from the mystic poetry of Hafez or Khayyam. But it wasn’t until my adult life in Australia that I realised the depth of their meaning.

This body of work is about how I translate the wisdom of the ancient Iranian poets—Khayyam, Hafez, Firdausi and Rumi—transforming their love and devotion into something that is visible and contemporary.  I wish to convey the message of peace within their poetry to fellow Australians who are seeking the same dream.

It is a journey from East to West through lines of poetry with a visual mind. I read the poems, interpret their meaning and transform them into artefacts that we all can share because we see them as a form and not a foreign language.

The urge to express this feeling has grown in me since I left Iran at the age of 18. For the last 50 years I have been living overseas, mostly in Western countries, with 38 of them in Melbourne. I’ve become fascinated by the medium of sculpture and how effectively and skilfully Western artists use it to tell their stories.

Coming from a culture where the visual arts are limited to paintings, and illustrations through rugs and ceramics, the idea of translating and transposing the messages and the inner meanings of traditional Persian poetry into three-dimensional forms germinated in my mind.

Every piece will have a story to tell. It is also my story—the journey of a migrant seeking to understand her culture through fresh eyes.