Aryana Minai

For centuries, the act of putting pen to paper—whether it’d be through Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic calligraphy, or a script of Chinese characters—has disseminated stories, tradition, and craft across the world.

For Aryana Minai, it’s the paper itself—devoid of the scrawl upon it—that holds the most weight. Minai’s practice, which sees her make paper-based sculptures embossed with salvaged materials from her diasporic upbringing, is intimately linked to philosophies and histories of architecture, migrations, labour and the handmade.

Each sculpture is the product of one studio day. The artist will blend paper and water into a soupy pulp, before straining and spreading this soggy mass into a brick-lined mould on her studio floor. Architectural artifacts such as piping broken off a house in her Los Angeles neighbourhood or woodblocks used by textile printers decades before will then be impressed onto these surfaces, producing heavily textured works of art.

Minai’s work embodies a desire to preserve historic space and fold her diasporic identity into an unified object. Born in the U.S. to Iranian parents, Minai has grappled with the idea of ‘homeland’, and now having spent a great deal of time away from her native country, Minai’s artistic process serves to connect her to her earliest memories through an active effort to remember.