“Every little stone on the ground is unique, and that’s kind of cool,” says artist Kamran Samimi. “Maybe we can stop and appreciate these small moments. Take the time to look around, take a breath, express gratitude. It's a lot of gratitude.”
Stone, earth, the land and, by extension, nature are integral elements for how Samimi sees the world and his place in it.
They are also tools and often the subject matter of his artistic practice.
His current show, titled Before Nature (I Am Both Created and Destroyed), at the upstairs space in The Third Line gallery at Alserkal Avenue, is a homage to a multitude of the self through stone.
Three large-scale paintings stand facing a series of stone sculptures and smaller paintings on the opposite wall. Swirling marks in earth tones move in a mass across the three large canvases.
Titled Translations, the paintings are map-like – raw and expressive as they depict a sense of rooted movement.
Samimi created the works in the three weeks leading up to the opening of the exhibition when he visited the UAE and took inspiration from the land's natural materials.
In the mountainous region of Wadi Shawka in Ras Al Khaimah, Samimi draped pieces of canvas on four particular stones that spoke to him.
“It's a process of translation and interpreting the story told by the stones,” he tells The National.
“Wadi Shawka is a very arid, rocky landscape. And it was just so rich. I was overwhelmed with the sort of subtle beauty of those ancient stones.”
He then the rubbed the surface of the canvas with oil sticks, instinctually choosing which colours to use while moving around the canvas and the stone.
“It’s a very physical process and in a way, I think of it as almost like an active meditation,” he adds.
“I'm in this state where I'm communicating and listening and observing and translating these stories and thoughts, but it's super physical. I'm running around the stones – I don't start in one place and then work my way up. It's sort of all over, in phases.”
Samimi’s marking on the canvas through the stone's face was not only a way to create a form of dialogue between himself and the land, but to also connect himself to something deeper and more personal.
“It was not just to speak with the stones and hear the stories told by them, but also a chance to connect with my ancestry from the region as I had never been to Iran and that was the closest that I've ever come to that place,” Samimi says.
Samimi’s affinity with the concept of land and ancestors is intertwined with his experiences growing up as an Iranian-Norwegian in the Hawaiian countryside.
From his lighter skin colour to his name, Samimi didn't feel that he fit in physically or socially in Hawaii. However, time spent in nature with his family, visiting volcanoes or collecting stones with his father, extended a greater sense of belonging to Samimi.
“I felt like the natural world was a place that I could belong," he says. "That world accepted me for who I was, and I was free to be myself and explore and experience."
Samimi’s sculptural stone works, most of them basalt stones from Hawaii, are also stunning. Like his paintings, they are rooted but also push against notions of gravity.
The stones are cut with precision and the artist elaborates that he shears off a piece of a stone or cuts into it and then mends it back together in a slightly different way. He then coats it with indigo pigment or gold leaf, like a healing process or to "anoint the stone". It's a means to honour the interior space, the energy within the stone that he has now revealed to the world.
While the visual contrast between the gold and the natural surface of the basalt stone is striking, there is also a commentary in the pieces connected to the idea of value – in particular to the concept of how we perceive everything around us as a resource for consumption.
Gold, for example has significant history throughout the human story. And for Saimimi combining a highly valuable material with a very common stone is pointing to the value system humanity has cultivated over time.
“The contrast of resources and how we interact with our world and how we manage what we find, brings up the question of what is worthwhile and that which is worthless,” he says.
“To me, the basalt stone is the more valuable, the gold you can buy it from the store. Because that stone there's only one of those that exists. And so that's priceless.”
Kamran Samimi’s Before Nature (I Am Both Created and Destroyed) at The Third Line gallery at Alserkal Avenue is on until Friday
