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."
Gholizadeh's most recent tapestries and sculptural installations explore landscape, pictorial notions of perspective, and hand weaving and embroidery practices as carriers of personal and emotional meaning. Her 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, Gholizadeh 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."
