For home
Coloured land (2013)
Digital and screen prints, handwriting with gouache on paper
53 x 35 cm
Photography: Layli Rakhsha
Coloured land shows my engagement with the process of screen-printing, multiple layering and the use of images in a way that allows me to represent the limitations that come from my experience of migration and being in diaspora. I develop the idea of multiple layers by using screen-printing and handwriting together to display my poetic sensibility. In this work, I printed one image three times on top of each other. The first layer is a digital print while the second layer is an upside down silkscreen print of the same image in black ink, and the third layer is the same printing technique using white ink. The fourth and the last layer is my handwriting of the word khaneh (home) on top of the printed images. All these layers share the same space. The word khaneh and the printed images of the landscape intertwine and overlap each other in order to manifest an expression.
Coloured land represents a kind of visual material about a certain place, while the handwritten word khaneh seems to offer verbal information about another place. The image and the word depend on each other to complete my representation of the idea of home in this work. The image of Australian landscape is not very clear or related to a particular place, and the word ‘home’ is in Farsi language, so the combination of these two speaks of my determination to make a dialogue between two different places.
As I keep calling for khaneh and looking at my printed images of the Australian landscape, I am searching for my attachment to perhaps more than one place. The repetition of the word khaneh not only refers to documenting events, affective moments and desires, but also tells or hints at my search for a place that can be called home.
Coloured land is from a project called For home.
Selected works of this project are in this portfolio.