Hadieh Shafie was born in Teheran, Iran. After studying painting at Pratt Institute in New York, she now lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Her tessellating pen-and-ink drawings, with their calligraphic lines and delicate colors, are just as staggering as the sculptures. She constructs them out of thousands of rolled, hand-dyed strips of paper.
Ink/acrylic and Paper with printed & hand written Farsi Text Esheghe “Love”
Shafie’s brightly colored paper art evokes both ancient handcrafts and modern pixilation. As she says, her influences include movements like Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism.
Spike 2012 Ink, acrylic and paper with printed & hand written Farsi Text Esheghe “Love”
Her paper world is magnificent, full with colors and life. It is fascinated that she builds fascinated geometric sculptures filled with intriguing patterns of color, just using simple strips of paper. She binds the strips together into scrolls that blend together into interesting and various unexpected combinations.
Ghalb 1 trans. Heart (Ketab) 2013 Ink, acrylic and paper with printed & hand written Farsi Text Esheghe “Love/ Passion”
Ghalb 2 trans. Heart (Ketab) 2013 Ink, acrylic and paper with printed & hand written Farsi Text Esheghe “Love/ Passion”
Throughout the creation process, she had to make lot of purposeful choices about her limited color palette and the placement of scrolls. She says that in the process of creation the more interested feeling is the “tension between control and spontaneity that emerges at every step.”
Fragments II 2014 Ink, acrylic and paper with printed and handwritten farsi text Eshgh (Love/Passion)
Transition 2 2014 Ink, acrylic and paper with printed and hand-written Farsi text Eshgh “Love/Passion”
Upon completion, each piece stands as a large-scale collective whole that will instantly capture a viewer’s attention and encourage a more extensive investigation. As a viewer moves closer, the smaller details are revealed, including hundreds of individual paper layers as well as the repetition of a single, hand-painted Farsi word “eshghe” which, in English, means “love.”
2010 Ink and Paper with hand written Farsi Text Esheghe “Love”
“I am drawn to the relationship of parts to the whole, to the interplay of materials, of surface and depth, and the possibilities of tension and movement.” Shafie Hadieh
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