Cyrus Iravani

Statement

In her book, The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym suggests that 'Modern Nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history'. This quote creates a context for the paintings that form my body of work, 'Your Place is Empty', and which are derived from a handful of slides that for me, are the only connection with my past. Through working with these images, I have tried to make sense of my personal history in relation to these images and explore how this history is defined and reformed through the process of painting.

My interest lies in creating images that evoke a real or imagined past, and the way in which these acknowledge the irreversible and terminal nature of time. This episode from my family history has been preserved through photography, but the chemical reaction that fixed this moment has inexorably contributed to the deterioration and decay of the source material. The act of painting from these slides is a futile attempt to preserve the moment, to make permanent that which was transient and fleeting.

Qualifications and training
• 2006 MA Fine Art (painting), Wimbledon College of Art

• 1990 BA (Hons) 3-Dimensional Design (furniture and related products), Kingston Polytechnic
Group exhibitions

• 2007 Art Auction in support of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, The Building Centre, Store Street, London WC1, London

• 2007 “MA's All”, Stroud House Gallery, Stroud, Gloucestershire

• 2006 MA Degree Show, Wimbledon College of Art

• 2006 “BASE!”, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London

• 2006 “Working Drawings, Working Out”, Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon School of Art