Maryam Hafizirad is an international award-winning Deaf Canadian Persian painter and sculptor. She is a freelance visual artist, art curator, teacher, mentor and advocate for Deaf artists. A graduate of Isfahan University of Fine Arts (2002), her exhibitions have been featured in Iran, China, Germany, Malaysia, India, Canada and the United States. Maryam’s Persian classical early works were dark in subject and colour, with women’s faces and bodies forbidden. When she moved to Malaysia and settled in Canada, her work transformed. She began painting using Persian and Deaf View/Image Art (DeVIA) metaphors with strong contrasting colours, textures and incorporating Deaf experience and values. Pomegranates were symbols of hidden love released, fish in water represented sincere human beings in her silent world of pure visual beauty and birds embodied her newfound freedom as a Deaf woman in this new country.
Flurry of Hands
By Maryam Hafizirad
Glazed Ceramic
This work references Hafizirad’s journey as a Deaf adult into signed language after a childhood in which she was trained to communicate through oral and aural language. In Hafizirad’s narration of the meaning of the piece, she describes the gold plating on some of the fingers of the hands as referencing the preciousness and magic of signed communication. Her journey of coming to signed language as an adult describes one that many Deaf people raised with oral education go through. The myriad shapes of the ceramic hands are set in relief of negative space. The property of ceramic – at once solid and delicate – seems to suggest the fleeting nature of language, and its persistent ways of staying with us. The work, understood here in the context of Crip Ritual, suggests that accessing the Deaf community through signed language is a ritual process that carries Hafizirad into a new life phase.
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