Roksana Pirouzmand Iranian, b. 1990

The sculptural installation, “The Past Seeps through the Present” (2022), features a ceramic cast of her grandmother’s body, suspended above an unfired clay cast of her mother’s figure, which lies recumbent on a couch. Drops of water fall slowly from the grandmother’s body onto the mother’s, gradually eroding the unfired clay and dissolving it into the couch. This relentless yet delicate process transforms the installation into a temporal experience, transcending its static image. Like a music track played only once, it unfolds in time, with the erosion marking an irreversible journey. Through this fleeting yet profound transformation, the artist meditates on themes of memory, lineage, and the impermanence of familial ties.
Working with the material clay is deeply rooted in the physicality of creation: the artist’s hands molded these forms, and the clay bears the imprint of her touch, grounding the work in an intimate bodily connection, though the work does not result from a playful process of freely shaping clay, and the figures were carefully replicated out of molds. Pirouzmand explores the materiality of memory—how the body holds and releases histories and how touch becomes a way of knowing.