Elham Hajesmaeili

Lives and works in Emeryville, CA

Artist statement

Artist Statement I often begin with something I cannot fully place: a sensation, a fragment of a building, or the memory of a space I once experienced. I do not try to reconstruct it exactly. I stay with what is incomplete and allow the work to develop from there. Distance changes the way memory returns. What has been left behind does not disappear, but it comes back altered by time and by what I am living through now. Sometimes it returns as an opening, a wound, a pattern, or a form that feels both bodily and architectural. My recent work has moved increasingly toward ceramics and mixed-media sculpture. I am interested in the inside of forms as much as their exterior: cavities, broken edges, surfaces, and spaces that can feel like parts of a body, a vessel, or a remembered building. I choose materials based on what the work needs, sometimes bringing ceramics together with textile, water, sound, or light. I rarely know exactly what a work will become when I begin. I let the material and process change the direction of the work. In that process, I trust what the body remembers when the mind can no longer fully recall.

Artwork