Stone-Ideas.com 
In some of her works she also implements her country’s carpet tradition in marble
Sahar Khalaji is a sculptor from Iran, estimated to be in her mid-30s, likes to wear careful make-up and dress in Western fashion, known for monumental works in stone. The word ”feminine” often appears in her social media posts, and the question of ”femininity” seemed to us to be the right approach to her artistic personality.
To get her to talk about herself, we placed the above pictures next to each other and asked her what the two figures in the picture, apparently completely different but in reality the same person, actually have in common.
And her answer promptly turned to femininity. She expressed it as a tension between elegance and strength: “On both pictures, there is a woman full of feminine themes, who always wants to talk about beauty. On the right, it is shown in the way she deals with the material, on the left, we see it in her appearance, expression, and personal and social behaviors.”
And she adds: “And of course, the woman on the left is stubborn and resistant in achieving her goals, similar to the stone she uses to create her artwork in the photo on the right.”
She later explains this in relation to her work: “I talk about women and being a woman, speaking from my own experience. I talk about the beauty of a woman, about her pains, about the contrast between her inner and outer world. A woman hood is a world of thousands of layers.” And continues: “Sometimes I try to convey these feminine feelings by showing female forms, which refer to the female body and physique, and sometimes with only a few abstract lines and surfaces.”
Her work at the Tuwaiq Symposium 2024 in the Saudi capital Riyadh also had this theme: “It is combination of soft and curved forms, alongside, smooth and broken surfaces and lines, full of contradictions, all that a human being in the modern world is. Yes, she is a human being who lives in the modern world.”
There is a photo on Instagram of her with the coach of the Iranian women’s national football team, Maryam Irandoost. She once came to a symposium in Iran and was thrilled to see a woman among all the male sculptors.
We asked her whether, after what she had written about beauty and fashion, the shoes covered in marble dust in the photo and the baggy pants bothered her.
She replied that she loves the hard world of working with stone: “I love myself while wearing work clothes and safety shoes that are dirty and dusty, and with a face that is make up of stone powder and dust.”
If she hasn’t worked with stone for a while, she would miss it, she writes.
Then the combative side of her comes through: “Stone is alive and has a soul, and for this reason it is enough to befriend it and then you will see how it accepts to be tamed by you.”
Sahar Khalaji grew up in a family that always supported her path into art. Her father was a wood sculptor. “I studied sculpture at Tehran University of Art and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. I make sculptures with stone, wood, bronze, plaster, fiberglass, paper mâché, etc. My main and only job is sculpting and this is how I make a living.”
Her family and her professors at the university probably also instilled in her a love of the country and its culture. In any case, there are works of hers in which she interprets the local carpet culture as a massive stone sculpture: once as a stack of such objects, once as a block over which a carpet is thrown. Typical motifs are engraved in the stone.
We came across this work during our research but did not mention it in our questions.
But she included it in her email: It shows a work from a sculpture symposium in Belgium and deals with the topic of women and freedom.
(09.09.2024)