Behind the Art
I am beautiful.?!
Who decides what is beautiful?
“I Am Beautiful” is a series of eleven artworks exploring the human body, beauty standards and the right to define ourselves beyond society's expectations.
The works present fragmented and reimagined bodies that resist conventional ideals of beauty. Through painting, distortion and the reconstruction of bodily forms, I question how our perception of beauty is shaped by cultural norms, gender expectations and systems of judgment.
The creative process is an ongoing negotiation between vulnerability and empowerment. As forms emerge, disappear and transform on the surface, the body becomes something that cannot be reduced to a single ideal or definition.
For me, beauty is not about perfection or conformity. It is about presence, individuality and the freedom to exist on one's own terms.
Eleven works. Eleven expressions of the body. One fundamental question: Who gets to decide what is beautiful?
Year: 2026
Number of works: 11
Medium: Mixed-media painting
Materials: Acrylic paint, Persian carpet, wood and gay sheep's wool
Materials & Creative Process
From fragments to bodies, from bodies to identity.
The starting point for each artwork in the series I Am Beautiful was a fragment of a Persian carpet. I began by selecting a piece of carpet and searching for a body, a body part, a pose or a gesture that could enter into a visual dialogue with its shapes, patterns and colours.
The figures were based on self-portraits or photographs I had taken myself of people I know who agreed to model for me. It was particularly important to me to represent a diversity of bodies, gender identities and sexual orientations, rather than reproducing conventional ideas of beauty.
From there, I developed each composition by bringing together the carpet fragment, the human figure and additional visual elements. Wood served as the main painting surface throughout the series, becoming a foundation on which different materials, forms and identities could meet.
In one of the paintings, I also incorporated colourful sheep's wool left over from my earlier project Rainbow Wool. Reusing this material created a connection between different stages of my artistic practice.
The eleventh and final work, titled Tanam Pareh Pareh (تنم پارهپاره), meaning My Body Torn Apart in Persian, emerged from the remaining materials of the previous ten paintings. It was created entirely from leftover fragments of Persian carpets and wood.
Rather than introducing new materials, I brought together what had been cut away, discarded or left behind during the creation of the other works. In this final piece, the fragments themselves become the body — broken apart, yet brought together into something new.
For me, this final work is also a reflection on the series as a whole: on fragmentation, diversity, belonging and the possibility of finding beauty in what remains.
Materials: Persian carpet fragments, wood, acrylic paint, mixed media and, in one work, coloured sheep's wool from the Rainbow Wool project.