BODY · PLACE · MEMORY · DISTANCE
Across paintings and spatial studies, memories return as trace, wound, reflection, and sound.
Nothing
disappears.
It becomes the body.
2015-2017
2017-2023
TheBody Remembers
Pendulum of
Identity
About the
Body
2025-ongoing
Enter through
a series
Artist
Statement
I often begin with something I cannot fully place:
a sensation,
a fragment of a building,
or the memory of a gesture.
I do not try to reconstruct it. I stay with what is incomplete and allow the work to take shape from there.
Distance changes the way things return. What is left behind does not disappear; it comes back altered by
time,
absence,
and the present.
It may surface as pressure, a wound, an opening, or a form that feels both familiar and strange.
As I work, a bodily form may begin to resemble architecture,
while a remembered space may turn into skin, a fold, or a cavity.
I follow these shifts rather than working toward a fixed image,
trusting what the body remembers
when the mind cannot.
I keep returning to the body because it carries what has been lived but not always understood. It is shaped by how it is seen, touched, desired, and judged, yet part of it remains private.
For me, the body is both familiar and unknown...
a place we inhabit
but never fully know.
About the
Artist
Elham Hajesmaeili is an Iranian artist based in the United States. Working across painting, sculpture, and mixed media, she explores how the experience of distance reshapes the body, memory, and identity over time. She holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing and a dual-title Ph.D. in Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Pennsylvania State University.
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© 2025 ELHAM HAJESMAEILI . All Rights Reserved.
ELHAM HAJESMAEILI
Iranian artist based in the United States