Artist Bio: Azadeh Gholizadeh, born in Tehran (1982), left her home country in search of freedom and currently resides and works in Seattle. Azadeh's practice explores the connection between landscape and memory through the structured and tactile language of needlepoint and weaving. Working with yarn, felt, and wood, she examines how absence, distance, desire, and longing shape our perception of place and leave traces of both personal and collective memory. In her recent works, Azadeh has incorporated augmented reality to expand her exploration of longing. This interplay between craft and technology invites the viewer into fluid encounters where landscapes become archives and where belonging reveals itself as fragile and shifting.
Azadeh holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Science and Technology in Tehran (2008) and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012), where she studied under Richard Rezac and deepened her exploration of geometry as a metaphor for memory and time. Her architectural training continues to inform her work, grounding her abstractions in structural precision. Gholizadeh’s work has received recognition through New American Paintings Pacific Coast issue #175, the Artadia Award in Chicago (2022), and the Hopper Prize (2022). Additionally, her work has been featured in The New York Times, including the article More Miami Art Fairs to Explore (2023).
Shifting Perspective
A bridge between analog craft and digital logic; A suture between absence and presence.
It always begins with a visual spark: the sudden stillness of a Great Blue Heron, the silhouette of a lone tree, the shifting colors of twilight, some landscape that triggers memory and compels me to take a photo. Then comes the time in the studio, where I enter a cycle of fragmentation and unity: first, I isolate elements of the landscape, distilling them into essential shapes; then, I rebuild the image through the slow, repetitive process of needlepoint. Through this process, I explore the relationships between landscape, memory, and a perception of belonging. For me, landscape isn’t fixed; it’s mutable data to collect, archive, and examine. I trace how absence, distance, desire, and longing shape my sense of belonging. I return to landscapes like memories, not to capture them, but to witness how they dissolve and reassemble with each recollection.
Abstraction is my tool to give form to what defies description: the pressure of grief, the anxiety of separation, and the persistent weight of climate fear pressing on my chest. Just as dark matter invisibly binds galaxies together, abstraction in my work holds memory, grief, and longing. To find my way towards the pixelation of digital imagery (zoomed in so closely that it loses resolution and clarity), I follow a framework of horizontal and vertical stitches. The gestures of stitching go beyond simple patterns; they become acts of meditation and a technology for reconstruction. Each stitch serves as both a record and a reflection, creating connections across time and distance. In the counting of stitches, I find the order my life so often lacks, a steady rhythm that grounds me when the world feels fractured.
My experience of exile shapes my practice, as I build a life where welcome is provisional and identity unsettled. This sense of displacement sharpens my awareness of how fragile belonging can be. Through my work, I create spaces of shifting perspective, extending woven compositions into immersive experiences that reflect on the idea of home: something fragile, inconsistent, and perspectival. Viewpoints are central here (as I introduce directional elements across sculpture, tapestry, and installation) to invite viewers to move around, shift their vantage, and reframe their relationship between absence and presence