Poetry of a Place

Poetry of a place series explores the relationship between place, memory, and dislocation in connection to the emotional and affective investments they provoke and generate within us. In this series of work I am returning to various sites which were formative in my childhood and adolescence growing up in southwestern Iran during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. These are places and sites which have been either irrevocably lost or transformed in subsequent years. Sites with which I have lost contact, but possess a powerful hold and weigh on my memories, recollections and sense of the past. My work tries to capture how we remember belonging, and feelings of investment and attachment which can never be fully recovered. These places are suffused with a profound sense of mournful loss. At the same time they mundane and everyday spaces which are both familiar, and yet cease to be wholly recognisable.