Shahmaran: Anatomy of Healing

About the Artwork

The artist depicts Shahmaran not as a being, but as healing itself. She is the disease, the diagnosis, and the cure. The vertical columns cutting across the canvas are the stages a patient or a soul goes through. Dark blues and purples are the deepest, most hopeless moments of the illness. Oranges and reds are the feverish peak of the disease, the moment of crisis. And the light greens and blues seeping in between are the first signs of healing, that fresh breath brought by recovery. Shahmaran's fragmented body passes through all these stages. Because healing exists not at a single point, but at every moment of the process. Her scaly body is the guide within this labyrinth. Sometimes she takes on the color of the disease, because to understand a poison, one must become a part of it. Sometimes she shows the way out by taking on the color of the cure. At the heart of the work, the white column represents the purest form of healing. The spiral earring-like objects dangling in the painting are those elixirs distilled from Shahmaran's body. Each is a distilled essence of thousands of years of wisdom, a cure for a different ailment. In this work, it says that true healing sometimes requires sacrifice. Just as Shahmaran's body was torn apart to give healing to one and wisdom to another, in this painting, her body is fragmented to present us with the anatomy of healing.