I Bloom Where You Hold Me: Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian

Bodies gather and hold onto one another within unruly fields of flowers, forming constellations of intimacy. I Bloom Where You Hold Me brings together collaborative works from Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian’s ongoing Flower series, unfolding across gallery walls covered with hand-drawn graffiti. Rooted in the artists’ shared and individual experiences, the works consider what it means to care for, sustain and grow alongside one another.

Executed primarily in oil pastel on paper, the drawings are developed through an intuitive process using a rough and immediate visual language. Flowers are built from loose, gestural marks. Colours bleed as figurative scenes appear almost like small windows embedded within wild fields. The intimate scenes nestled between the flowers are drawn from real moments of care and togetherness experienced by the artists. Figures sit together, lean into one another, embrace or simply share space, preserving gestures of friendship and chosen family.

Accompanied by poetic titles rooted in a long-standing practice of letter writing, the drawings open up the space of private correspondence, extending the exchange between the artists towards those encountering the work.

I Bloom Where You Hold Me emerges from this condition of being together and the possibility that we might become softer without becoming less resilient, that care for another can itself be a way of enduring.

Text by Yalda Bidshahri