School of Art, Media and Design, UWE Bristol:
Somayeh Farzaneh
Book
2nd October - 2nd November 2009
It feels female to me, her being silent in such a profound and mature way, increases my special feeling towards her - being a teacher in a true sense at the right moment.
My appreciation increased to the soul of ‘Book’ as I became more sensitive to the world ... reading poems, looking at the blank paper, looking more closely at the paper itself ... sitting silently somewhere and she only starts talking to you at the moment that you are ready to listen to her, is her way.
She keeps her silence as long as you do not know how to read it, an absolute inner silence. ‘Book’ has a strong role in my challenges with art - I can say that
after nature, books play the biggest role in my life.
What I believe is that as an artist the first thing that needs to be learned is this: Learning how to be open to the entire being - inner and outer. I was reading poems from a book and I was enjoying turning the pages in a deep silence at night and I was wondering how to show my appreciation of this in my art works.
The first thing that amazed me about books was very simple: turn the pages and seeing how the world will change in the next page.
At the same time it became my ambition to make the language of the book universal. I was thinking about making a book in such a way that everybody would be able to read it visually ... so it does not require a specific knowledge of a certain language in order to understand it.
Therefore I chose a book whose language I could not read myself, and then I worked on it upside down. In this way it would be difficult even for people who actually knew the language of the book to read the text.
My work began.
I made the colours myself, I coloured the paper and waited for the pages to dry, and then I began to do different things to the paper itself, I chose water as the base of my work because water flows as much as a poem would make my mind flow.
Every page would change with my daily changes ... I could observe how much I was unable to control the effects …Turning the pages in this particular book of mine is the main thing that I want to consider. Facing the unexpected space and emptiness created by colour and traces of burning upon the book itself.
Turning the page becomes meaningful in a visual sense, that was what I really enjoyed... sometimes I see a very cold landscape, sometimes a desert, sometimes a forest…
My approach to this book continued for a long time because it was rich enough to feed me for that long.
I have continued working on books and my view of artists’ books and their effect on me is changing and changing. Working on single sheets as pages is a very rich experience for me because in a loose book, I think, page turning has no function ... therefore I create two visual sides as simply as possible ... with less pages and more concentration.
I am currently looking for a supervisor for Doctoral studies, or Masters to concentrate on graduate study on impermanence. Please contact me via wu.wie1@gmail.com, if you have any recommendations for me. I would also like to exhibit more of my works
Somayeh Farzaneh, Turkey, 2009
http://wu-wie.info
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