{"product_id":"may-we-all-be-free-sound-sculpture-by-nina-rastgar","title":"May we all be free - Sound Sculpture","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"I created a sound sculpture that is activated by the body, in which the audience uses their foot to produce sound. I was inspired by the idea of giving people a way to make noise together and connect within a crowd through a shared physical action.\u003cbr\u003eThe work consists of a copper container filled with rice from my homeland and a flute carving. The rice itself is not visible, but its presence is heard through movement. When activated, the sound of the rice shifting and colliding inside the container creates a rhythmic, collective noise. For me, this invisible material carries memory, place, and cultural connection, even when it cannot be directly seen.\u003cbr\u003eI performed this work in a jungle environment, where the sound extended into the surrounding landscape, creating a dialogue between body, material, and land. The piece explores how connection can emerge through sound, repetition, and shared sensory experience, even in the absence of direct visibility.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCopper, Wood, Rice\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003eApprox. \u003cspan\u003e6.5 x 6 x 17.5cm\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFor me, making and doing is a language of lived experience. In my way, making is not separate from thinking; it is a way of producing knowledge through touch, process, and interaction. I am an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and a PhD student in Media \u0026amp; Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University, working across sculpture, performance, and installation. \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI was raised among the Gilaki communities of Gilan province in northern Iran, a region shaped by agriculture, craft, and food culture. I worked at the Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Organization of Gilan, where I engaged in gardening and farming practices that later evolved into wearable sculptures and object-based works in wood and metal from 2014 to 2022. These experiences shaped how I understand making as relational, ecological, and collective, as my background in agriculture and fine art led me toward a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary way of thinking about art, in which material exploration becomes both a method and a language for cultural and political critique.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI received my MFA as a Presidential Fellow at the University of South Carolina, where I also taught as an Adjunct in the School of Visual Art and Design from 2022 to 2025. My pedagogy is rooted in participatory learning, material experimentation, collective critique, and social awareness, shaped by my sensitivity to material language and my experience as a teacher and artist. Over the past several years, I have received scholarships and residencies from craft institutions including Penland School of Craft, Peters Valley School of Craft, the Center for Metal Arts, the John C. Campbell Folk School, and Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft. My work has been exhibited internationally, including in Iran, Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI approach craft as both a method and a form of refusal.     From my experience, it resists dominant systems of knowledge that privilege writing, reading, and abstraction as the primary ways of producing meaning. Instead, I work through embodied and material processes in which knowledge emerges through doing. My methodology is craft, and through it, I question how norms are constructed and maintained. I believe in process and slowness; Through this process, fostering critical conversations between individuals and their environments is central to my work. I aim to create spaces that challenge dominant narratives of norms.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI found that crafting with hand and mind is a site of negotiation between the personal and the political, opening space for alternative ways of knowing, sensing, and acting. I work with materials such as metal, wood, soil, fabric, and paper, and assemble found objects because I am interested in how material conditions shape experience in the sites they inhabit. \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCurrently, I live in Toronto, and my research is at the intersection of eco-social practices, craftivism, materiality, and gender. In my program, I approach technology not as an object of optimism or spectacle, but as a lived condition that shapes and redistributes labour, agency, and visibility across bodies and environments.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nina Rastgar","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53210017792111,"sku":"NINRAS-C0001","price":700.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2351\/6881\/files\/Nina_Rastgar_Mayallbefree_02.jpg?v=1781116508","url":"https:\/\/craftontario.com\/products\/may-we-all-be-free-sound-sculpture-by-nina-rastgar","provider":"Craft Ontario","version":"1.0","type":"link"}