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.
Press Kit
- 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. - 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. - 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.
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