Suspended Healing Garden, 2019

Montalvo Art Center (2026), Saratoga, CA, curated by Kelly Sicat
The San Diego Museum of Art (2024) and McMullen Museum of Art, Boston, MA (2025): As part of Wonders of Creation, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, represented by the Getty and curated by Dr. Ladan Akbarnia.
Root Division, San Francisco, CA (2019)

Suspended Healing Garden evokes memories from my upbringing in the city of Shiraz, Iran, known for its herbal medicine tradition. As a child, I spent ample time browsing through the traditional drugstores in Shiraz with my grandmother, who firmly believed in the healing power of herbal medicine for all kinds of minor physical and emotional ailments.  The plants in the Suspended Healing Garden are modeled after medicinal plants depicted in the 12th c. Arabic botanical manuscript, the Herbal of Al-Ghafiqi.

I drew plants using digital applications and taught myself how to operate a laser-cutting machine. Over six months, with just two hours of machine access per week, I created 170 paper plants for this installation. I silkscreened original texts from the manuscript, describing the healing properties of plants, on some of the shapes. The shadows evoke delicate plant shadows in a garden.

The inverted portrayal of plants is a metaphor for my life as an immigrant; once uprooted, life becomes suspended, and things turn upside-down. It takes years to adjust and heal.

Installation dimension: 10 x 16 x 4 feet
170 laser-cut paper plants, silkscreen-printed text, fishing line, rods, and shadows.

Research

The plants in the installations are inspired by healing plant images depicted in the Herbal, a 12th-century Andalusian botanical manuscript. I first viewed the digitized version of the manuscript at the Malek Library in Tehran in 2015.