Stitched 2 is a work that emerged from Pouran Jinchi’s re-encounter with the 1936 psychological novel The Blind Owl (Būf-i kūr) by Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat. The Blind Owl, a discourse of pain rendered in solitude, was a literary response to the social and political change during the 1970s. Jinchi developed various techniques that respond to the text including the cutting of the paper tiles that comprise this work, stitching them together again with copper thread. The text chosen by the artist from the novel has been partitioned into a grid and then rendered illegible by rearrangement and turning, becoming something entirely different, symbolic and personal. And yet, the work also invokes a universal experience of re-composition of the self after a traumatic or painful event. Stitched 2 is a window into Jinchi’s investigations into the relationships between the subconscious and narratives provided by image, literature, pattern-making and the materiality of engineered structures and surfaces.
Pouran Jinchi
Stitched 2
2015
Ink and copper on handmade paper with copper thread
52 x 47 in (132 x 119 cm)
Pouran Jinchi
b. 1959
Pouran Jinchi earned a degree in civil engineering at George Washington University. Trained as a classical calligrapher in Iran, Jinchi went on to study art at UCLA and the Art Students League in New York. As an artist, Jinchi expands her subject of interest by breaking them down into specific components and layering them with abstraction. Her complex process results in works that invite the viewer into her world to uncover and decode patterns and meaning, seemingly just beyond reach, drawing upon the experience of the monumental calligraphy and patterns applied in tilework to the immense sacred structures of her native Mashhad. Jinchi’s work is widely collected and exhibited in the US and worldwide.
