The Lost Object

Mixed-media sculpture

The Lost Object presents a realistic bust of the artist enclosed within a larger, openwork version of itself, composed of Persian visual elements and inscribed with poetry in the artist’s own handwriting. Drawing on verses by Rumi, the lattice-like outer form evokes the spiritual notion that the body is a vessel secondary to the soul. The poems, legible through the play of light and shadow on the inner bust, reveal how language, literature, and cultural heritage shape the self.

Inspired by Jacques Lacan’s notion of the lost object and the perpetual human search for wholeness, the work probes the tensions between the natural and the culturally constructed aspects of identity. The sculpture becomes a meditation on absence and formation _ how culture frames what is “lost” or repressed in the process of becoming a subject. Through this dialogue between material and metaphor, The Lost Object explores the fragile boundary between the innate and the imposed, the personal and the collective.