Hers came to her through whispers. Mine reached me like a scorch along the nerve string to the brain. 
Kimia Amini’s process of creation is precious and feels sacred: a gentle exploration of the presence of spirits in her subconscious, as well as those found in nature, with a celebration of the holy idols found in small things. Her tender welcoming of her co-walkers into the waking world, whilst generously letting them grow within, echoes a purification that draws her closer to her own divine. By understanding her loyalty to herself she continuously threads the marvellous, enabling the luckiest viewers to feel the kind and gentle pulse of her fragile wonders. It’s almost as if, through the release of her intricate fabric, Kimia has created amulets for us: their final forms come to us without a word and help us challenge and question the unreason of evil. Our senses reawaken and rekindle with the inner vitality of the elements. In the words of the artist herself, ‘I feel the process is instinctual? We create straight onto the surface, blind to our own desires and needs, until we demonstrate what is simmering beneath the surface as a way of communicating with ourselves, with one another, and with the room. The idea starts to grow like the feeling of having a stone in your shoe, which you’ll have to uncover to discover.’ To know her is to know this cluster of sweet totems is always bobbing at the surface and releasing the sweetest fragrance, reawakening each of our senses. I can hear their whispers too now.
When I saw Kimia’s work for the first time the glamorous enchantments generated an electric current reaching my own breath-like creations as they waited, floating weightlessly and unmoored to the waking world. Using my subaqueous changelings as a seismograph of my own private eruptions, my process feels more like a ritual lament, an honouring of the erosion of thoughts and memories I find challenging. The day I chose to represent the nervous trees of my reason and give my jitters their own ligaments was the day I finally celebrated memories that had been buried without a proper ritual, cast-aways neglected, thinly veiled and growing translucent with vexation over time. My memory work leads me to challenge the shape of wounds, catching them in-extremis before they become enfleshed in darkness as I slowly negotiate with their larval state. Summer’s breath helps me rekindle: my earthquakes, tornadoes and tempests no longer seem calloused, but instead adopt metamorphic appearances I have grown to love. Though skipping between the worlds of souvenirs isn’t always easy, I wouldn’t know how to without my good-walkers.
 Initially beyond the reach of bodily eyes, the splinters in the pieces on show are veiled forms no longer silenced. They are incandescent lights that pass through us, now safeguarded in the reliquary chapel that is Residuals. With a slow semaphore of invitation our leaks had a shy dance and, as if always in conversation, they left collective mementos confirming the spark of a world taking shape. Like meteorites from lands that are very much our own.
 Enjoy the husks of our good-tempered biomorphism, an eclogue served by a lot of A’s and a lot I’s.

 - exhibition text by Alexia Marmara, February 2024