Statement:

O Gallery presents “Things …”, a collection of textile works by Laleh Memarardestani (b. 1972 Tehran, Iran), marking the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and inaugurating the first series of O/ut Projects.

Having spent recent years caring for her mother and bound to stay home during COVID, Memarardestani turned to household objects—plants, kitchen utensils, doors, a sofa and other quiet fixtures of domestic life—as her primary subjects.

With a background in fashion, she chose textile as a material closely tied to the human body, allowing her to stitch the quiet weight of homebound days into forms that carry imposed presence and trace.

By using turmeric to permanently dye the textiles, she draws on a substance associated with healing, turning everyday materials into carriers of pain and memory. 

All works are made with a mechanical sewing machine whose steady rhythm of black-thread stitching preserves the line-based quality of her earlier drawings.

Together, the works form a quiet tribute to what a home absorbs and holds, while quietly acknowledging the tensions embedded in domestic life: the violence of a stitched lit cigarette against a hand, or the muted threat of a soft dull knife, for instance.