The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture by Mohamadali Vadood is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2019 Bronze A' Design Award in Cultural Heritage and Culture Industry Design Competition Category.
BronzeCultural Heritage· 2019
The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture
Bronze A' Design Award Winner in Cultural Heritage Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #62217The Design
About The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture
The Bird from Paradise is a wooden sculpture shaped as a bird. The sculpture brings together seven traditional Iranian arts, including Muqarnas, marquetry, wood carving and wood turning. A new method called Leveling Muqarnas was developed for the work, placing carved layers of different thickness instead of small repeated pieces. The lower body uses the new method, while the crown follows the traditional one. The natural colors of jujube, boxwood, rosewood and other woods are left unpainted. The eyes are made from a single seashell from the Persian Gulf.
The Recognition
About the Bronze A' Design Award
The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture is a Bronze A' Design Award winner, a highly prestigious recognition granted to outstanding designs distinguished by creativity, ingenuity, and astuteness. Bronze winners are amply skillful and strikingly creative artifacts that authenticate the vast experience, imagination, and resourcefulness of their designers. The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished object that is notably professional and innovative. This Bronze A' Design Award-winning design incorporates best practices in art, science, design, and technology, and is excellent for its attention to detail. The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture splendidly satisfies needs, touches desires, charms feelings, and appeals to curiosity.
Interviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
It is told in the legend of 'Ebrahem and the Birds' that he hunted four birds, mixed their meat and then dividing it into three, put some on the summit of three different mountains as he felt like observing the power of God if he could ever recreate the birds. It was then when God ordered them to come together and get awake again.
The idea of ' A bird from a Kingdom in Heaven' arose from this belief that art can be such enthusiasm motivated by God and be represented by putting pieces of woods next to each other by asking help from various forms of arts.
Grand Interview
Your innovative approach to Muqarnas in The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture represents a significant evolution in traditional Iranian arts - could you elaborate on how you developed this "Leveled Muqarnas" technique and its potential impact on preserving this endangered art form?
Muqarnas technique of leveling gives us the opportunity to create asymmetric forms, different from regular forms, due to the layering of moqrans components on the so-called levels 'footing' and 'stepping'. For this reason, it creates the necessary ground for artists to create different combinations from the previous traditional modes. This new horizon can lead to the formation of completely new methods, approaches and experiences that will bring the thought and art of Muqarnas into a new era of its history.
The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture masterfully integrates seven traditional Iranian arts - what inspired you to combine these distinct techniques, and how did you ensure each art form complemented rather than competed with the others?
In traditional Iranian arts, there is an important concept called 'enchantment of creating'. It refers to the invisible energy that is transmitted to the audience from works of handicrafts, especially wooden works and Persian carpets, and gives a sense of life and constancy to a work. This feature makes the audience feel that the work is growing and evolving and that they wants to interact with it, make changes in it in their mind or even create a similar work themselves. Enchantment, in fact, is the extension of the work's life in the audience's imagination and creativity. The coexistence of different types of traditional arts, according to the concept of enchantment, can create a complex effect and be manifested a single work.
The spiritual inspiration behind The Bird from Paradise Wooden Sculpture draws from the story of Abraham - how did this religious narrative influence your artistic decisions in selecting and working with different wood varieties from Jujube to Robinia?
It is said and experienced through history that human always feels weaker than the stronger state he is actually able to experience. Therefore, throughout the history of civilization, we have come to this conclusion that we always need a driving factor to dare to step beyond the safe edge of knowledge, and this factor is our 'belief'. In fact, these are beliefs that help us strive for something that may not have a result, and it is generally this effort that expands the circle of human civilization. Among the interesting and evocative belief systems, there are religious beliefs that are mixed with mythical and provocative illusions of reality and strongly arouse the imagination of artists. The character of Abraham and the religious legends related to him are always inspiring and exciting for me.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Among the all the arts, a specific attention is paid to Muqarnas. This amazingly beautiful art was mostly used for the architectural designs and is being created by putting together repetitive and arranged pieces to create geometric designs. Due to difficulty in application and limitation in design, which caused repetitive forms, Muqarnas is being extinct.
To create a new application for Muqarnas, an innovative method was required to exploit Muqarnas out of the symmetry and repetition of geometric limitation. For this purpose I invented a innovative method that I call “Leveling Muqarnas”. Unlike the traditional method, which was creating a Muqarnas by putting small pieces side by side or just as a one big piece, I put them in different layer and based on the form and design divide them into thick or thin layers and then carved the Muqarnas designs into them.
The lower body of “The Bird from Heaven” is made by the leveling Muqarnas and the crown is designed by the traditional method, to make the comparison simpler and show the capabilities of this beautiful art.
During the work, tried to ensure real colors of woods are being used instead of coloring them. For example the light and darker color of the neck is for one piece of Jujube wood and all the colors on the heard are the real colors of the woods.
The eyes are the shell from the Persian Gulf and they have been cut in a way that pupils are actually the sediments inside the shell and its only one piece. - Dimensions & Packaging
- 90*40*40
30*30*120 - Tags
- Art,Traditional art,sculpture,design, Artistic woodwn work,wooden art,woodwn work,Muqarnas,Wood craving,
- Production Technology
- Muqarnas, wood carving, traditional Iranian wood carving-grating, Iranian marquetry, wood turning, sculpting, and Iranian marquetry-carving are the arts which came together for performing this work so that the basic idea could be better visualised as a design.
Materials: Various woods, including Jujube, Millettia laurentii, Buxus, Rosewood, Haloxylon and Robinia plus the natural seashells from Persian Gulf. - Research
- All the steps have been taken with the benefit of the members' artistic knowledge and experience.
- Inspiration
- God resurrected 3 chopped and mixed birds, which were located on the summit of 3 different mountains, so Abraham can witness the resurrection.
The story of Abraham inspired me to believe, art as a divine phenomenon can recreate by putting together pieces of dead wood via different arts.
To make this happen, I put together 7 different arts like sculpturing, Muqarnas, Marquetry (Moaraq), Munabat, etc. along with wood from Jujube, Haloxylon, boxwood, Robinia, rosewood, etc. - Project Duration
- The project started
- Operation Flow
- This design is basically a still sculpture and can not be transformed into anything else.
First, the idea for designing this piece is based on the best bird figure that can face the constraints of performing while doing all muqarnas, sculptures, decorations and other works on it. So, this work is more or less based on the capabilities of the fields of art which were used to perform it and could all together come next to each other. In order to separate different fields in the performance, the components are carrying various natural colours of different woods as if they reflect a rainbow of colours which have been assembled as the parts of the bird's body. - Team Members
- Mr Mohamadali Vadood
Ms Shadi Habib
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