The gentle, lilting form of a palm leaf floats across the gallery wall. The contour of a reclining body slowly reveals itself. In Untitled (palm leaf) Hossein Valamanesh has skilfully manipulated a dried, fallen leaf by teasing out the lower frond to create a delicate fringe and plaiting and shaping the upper frond, to suggest a reclining figure. Deceptively simple, Valamanesh’s Untitled (palm leaf) is a characteristically meditative and poetic work.

The symbol of the palm leaf and its figurative sculpting (a self portrait perhaps) are powerful signifiers of Valamanesh’s perceived otherness and exoticism. Arriving in Australia in 1973 at the age of twenty-four, Valamanesh has spent almost his entire career in Australia and yet his work is haunted with ancestral connections and memory.

The palm leaf is an age-old symbol of the exotic and the other. A botanic species redolent with associations of the Middle East, it is a straightforward signifier of Valamanesh’s homeland of Iran. However, the palm is also a species found here in Australia. Often planted in isolation or estranged from its rainforest habitat, the palm appears dislocated in domestic, suburban Australia. As a tree endemic to both past and present homelands, the palm signals the artist’s search for a connection between both places; the plaiting of the form signals the weaving of cultural influences in the formation of self and identity. The silhouette or shadow is also a signature form for Valamanesh; a mystical projection of self hood and a symbol of possibility, flux and change.