We recently connected with Sam Marjaei and have shared our conversation below.

Sam, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Fifteen weeks into my Studio Art capstone as a part of my BA at Knox College, there came a shift in my practice from making wall sculptures to making monuments, all with wood. I was fortunate for the live cedar tree I received as donation from my advisor, which marked the beginning of my interest in the intensity of scale and weight in my work. Not to mention that since it’s live wood, there are ant colonies, and all sorts of life in there that remain to be a part of the pieces. I no longer felt the need to control or clean the material into submission. The presence of life, decay, and density felt honest, and that came to be important to me. Additionally, repetition of Farsi taking over a large and heavy space became integral to how I express identity through ornamentation. The repetition became a form of embodiment of all the “home” work I missed over the years. It is, quite literally, the most Farsi I’ve ever written in my life. It’s less about presentation and more about reclamation. This took me back home, where memorisation is an important element of school, and filling pages of your notebook with the same sentence is considered good practice.

These monuments are between 4 to 9 feet tall, and hold a physical and emotional weight that feels true to where I am now. Their scale, heaviness, and presence reflect not just what I want to say, but what I carry. They are accumulations of language, memory, movement, and loss.

Sam, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Of course. My name is Fatemeh Marjaei, but most people here, in the US, know me as Sam Marjaei. I’m Iranian by blood, heart, and soul, although my family moved to India during my elementary years until 2019. I spent over a decade of my life there and in 2021 I came to the States to pursue my bachelor’s degree. I had, and still have, a mixed understanding of home as a place or even concept, due to my third-culture identity. “A return home”, which is the title of my senior show, captures this third-culture identity as an Iranian educated in and for the West. The body of work I’ve developed this year has allowed me to gain a new acknowledgment of the duality within my identity as an Iranian, and being far from home. This is reflected through my choices of material, form, color, and scripture. During critiques, one question that came up frequently was: why wood? Through experimenting with other materials such as plexiglass, wire, and clay, I learned that I’m drawn to wood for its ubiquity, as it’s widely used as the basis of homes and furniture. This reminded me of a treehouse my brother and I built on our big walnut tree back home. It reminded me of the time my dad and I built a bed frame out of MDF boards during COVID. It reminded me of the wooden dining table I crawled off of and broke my arm when I was first learning to walk. Wood takes me back home.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

It was my final term of college, amid all the usual homesickness, I had a major revelation. While reading an article on Artsy titled 10 Iranian Artists Who Are Shaping Contemporary Art. I noticed the presence of their Persian identity in their work, which led me to question a few things. 1) How is my identity present in my work? 2) What do I share with the artists I admire? That same day, I rushed to my studio and covered up the list of artists on my wall with the Farsi alphabet. For context, I’m fluent in speaking my language of Farsi, but when it comes to reading and writing, I was busy learning English in my elementary years, so admittedly, I had to look up the alphabet to get the order of the letters right. The names on the wall— Jean Arp, Jim Osman, Ted Larson, and Joel Shapiro—mapped my entry into sculpture and inspired a formalist and cubist approach to my work. Covering them with the Farsi alphabet wasn’t about erasing influence. But the gesture felt like laying a foundation that had long existed beneath the surface, waiting to be acknowledged. That day forward, pursuing my studio practice became bitter, painful, and more than ever, alienating. I realised my Persian identity is buried deeper than I had imagined it would be, and I blamed the English language for taking Farsi’s place. This led a major pivot in my studio philosophy and practice.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding part of being an artist is arriving at the feeling that you’re an artist. It sounds unremarkable but for me it was cloud 9! I was struck by the difference between making art and believing you’re an artist. Up until the introduction of Farsi in my work, I was just making art. Can you imagine? I’ve studied Art for the past 4 years and only 5 weeks leading to graduation I actually felt like an artist. Naturally, that was a big moment for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://smarjaei.wixsite.com/marjaeiportfolio/portfolio
• Instagram: sfm.sammy
• Linkedin: Fatemeh Marjaei
• Other: Email: sfm.marjaei@gmail.com