ART by Elham M. Aghili

Dreamscape

Landscape in transition between dream, nature and matter

2021-2025
Weaving and embroidery
Textile yarns from company production waste and errors, iron wire

At the heart of the architectural space, a living, vibrant landscape takes shape, suspended between the boundaries of the visible and the imaginary. A work that does not represent but becomes: an impossible garden, a terrestrial coral reef, an ecosystem in perpetual metamorphosis. Nothing is fixed. Everything changes, blooms, dissolves, re-emerges in new forms. Metamorphosis is the very language of the work.
The installation is born from the spontaneous hybridisation of terrestrial and marine, botanical and animal, micro and macrocosm environments. Forms emerge from a soil that seems to pulsate with life: roots in incandescent colours intertwine and propagate like veins, the nutrients of a collective organism. From this soil emerge structures that evoke flowers as much as anemones, corals as much as tropical inflorescences.
Threadlike jellyfish float like suspended thoughts, while rigid petals assume tentacled postures. Nothing can be clearly classified: each element is a hybrid creature, defying taxonomy and visual habit. The garden and the reef become a single body: a dreamlike territory in mutation.
Everything is constructed through wire. A humble, flexible, tactile material that in its modular repetition generates complex, almost cellular forms. Each form is made up of thousands of repeated, knotted, layered gestures: a slow, artisanal, almost ritual time that infuses the forms with a bodily memory. The thread here is not just a construction material, but a vehicle for metamorphosis: it takes the form of root, cell, coral, tentacle, flower. The fibres behave like living tissue, which grows and changes, as if each element were caught in the middle of a transformation that has already begun but never ended.
The work does not merely evoke nature: it recreates it. But it is a transfigured, dreamlike nature, in which physical and biological laws are suspended to leave room for intuition, possibility, wonder. It is an imaginary ecosystem, where species are not described but invented, where each element exists to be traversed by change.
The landscape that emerges is both familiar and alien: we recognise floral structures, sea forms, plant textures, but none of them fit perfectly with what we know. It is as if the work were staging a post-natural future or a primordial memory, a place before classifications, or after the collapse of distinctions.
Metamorphosis, here, is also a cultural gesture. The recovery of textile waste, the transformation of forgotten material into living beauty, bears witness to a process of regeneration, of silent revolt against the ephemeral and wasteful. But it is also a broader reflection on identity, on the transformation of bodies, on the possibility of being other than oneself, and of making peace with the hybrid, the mutable, the in-between.
The barrier-garden that takes shape is not just an aesthetic place, but a space of resistance and rebirth, where what is multiple, mutant and undefined becomes powerful and necessary.