The experience of relocation and the desire to anchor in a place after my migration from Iran to the Netherlands has led to the following research question: 

How can the issues of ‘orphanhood’ and the re-connection to one’s environment be analyzed through art?

However, even thereafter, a feeling of ‘orphanhood’, persisted. Octavio Paz, a Mexican 20th-century existentialist, describes it as a notion of losing the origin or not-belonging to a certain society, and isolation. Through my question, I discuss how my art practices deal with ‘Orphanhood’, a condition of feeling disconnected to one’s environment, and in doing so, how these practices set forward possibilities for reconnection.

Through art, I use three different, but connected channels to explore how to reconnect with my environment with the installation of statues. Fertility, inspired by the incessant cycle of nature, is inexorably intertwined with rebirth and thus becoming a new being. The new being will experience abstract changes throughout time, which eventually will lead it to a vague future. Thus, in my practices, a strong focus is put not merely on the outcome, but also on the transformatory processes.

In my statue’s different organic abstract shapes such as the female body with natural elements like seeds and thorns are metaphorically transformed and united to create their own new being in space. 

I shall plant my hands in the garden 

And I will grow, I know I know I know 

And in my hands ink stained hallow 

The swallow shall lay its eggs.

 I know a sad little ocean sprite 

Down in her watery haven 

Who oh so softly 

Plays her heart through a flute, 

A sad little sprite who dies from a kiss at night 

To be born from a kiss at dawn.

(Farrokhzad, 2007)