Zendegi

Lar, the city where I live, is a full reflection of a world full of despair and emptiness: waterless, grassless, ruthless, and disappointing. In that scorching heat, I used to walk on its yellow and barren soil. Here, nature is indifferent and base, full of depression and emptiness. In this void, I would see the rotted bones of dead animals, which, like definitive signs of "nothingness," had emerged from the heart of the earth. At first, this blatant encounter aroused anxiety in me. The bones, bleached white under the hot sun of Lar, were a message to me about my own inevitable fate: to cease to exist.
With every encounter, my being would fill with terror and my heart rate would rise.
I didn't even like to look at the bones. Eventually, I took refuge from fear in fear itself.
Gradually, I began to collect the bones I saw.
I would take the bones home and, while simultaneously being afraid and curious and eager, I would wash and clean them in a ritualistic manner.

This process of cleaning the bones washed away my last fears. I was no longer afraid of the bones; instead, I loved them. Now, they had become a part of my life's journey.
I took the bones to the studio and carefully laid them all out on the old wooden table. I would watch them for long minutes, and then I picked up a rapidograph pen and white cardboard and started drawing the largest skull I had found in the earth. Every hatching on the surface of the cardboard calmed my heart and filled my being with peace.
From then on, the bones are no longer symbols of death and nothingness for me, but symbols of creation. Symbols of the birth of a new work of art on the white heart of the paper🙂

Later, I also added the element of the "egg" to my work. Because in my view, the egg is a symbol of birth and life, and its proximity to the bones of the dead conveys the concept of the coexistence and neighborliness of life and death, and how vulnerable and unpredictable our life is.