Three Drops of Blood “In my new series of felt pieces I explore the past in a mystical circle. There is a tension between the soft, rural, unpretentious felt, and the industrial techniques that animate it, which favour the silk screen process and relegate embroidery to an elusive, trailing border.

I fill these spaces with my personal hinterland – geographical, familial and historical. There is a map of Tehran, my hometown, whose pulsing arteries carry the stories and incidents that make me who I am. There is my great-grandfather, Mua’zam ul-Mulk, in the ornate cloak he wore to Tehran’s first parliament, and also his own father, the feudal Muhammad- Hossein Khan. From the nation’s common past, I draw on Amir Kabir, the reformer of the nineteenth century, and from our popular culture the talismans that give us protection. These images combine the intimate with the unattainable, for while they are familiar to me, their felt background is cracked and fractured, like the parched earth of the Iranian plateau. Where there are maps and personalities, there are events. I have tried to create a sense of mystery, hence the bright red reference that binds each piece together: three drops of fresh blood on each fresh page. These are a homage to Sadegh Hedayat’s sinister short story of the same name, with its suggestions of violence and disorder. They also reflect the artistic bafflement he expresses at the story’s opening.

For all this time, however much I begged for pen and paper, they wouldn’t give it to me. I had thought of all the things I would write whenever they gave me pen and paper... Then yesterday, without my even asking for them, they brought me pen and paper. Those things I had so longed and waited for! What’s the use? Ever since yesterday, however much I rack my brains, I’ve got nothing to write.

Hedayat’s words wind around each one of these circles of felt, reminding me of the highly ambiguous relationship between an artist and her medium. In Hedayat’s words, “Now that I pay attention to the jumbled lines that I have scrawled on the paper, all that is legible is: Three Drops of Blood.”