Radiant Seed

The lotus begins beneath still water, unseen, before it rises into open air. This piece holds that moment of becoming: neither fully submerged nor yet blooming, it rests in the charged pause between one state and the next. The radiating tendrils are not petals but roots reaching, or perhaps arms opening, depending on the hour and the quality of the light falling across them. The clay was worked by hand, coil by coil, each seed pod shaped individually and left with a small hollow at its crown, recalling the eye of an old stone bead or the mouth of a spring. At the very center, a faceted amber gem anchors everything, a single point of warmth against the chalk-white field. It does not shout; it simply holds its place. Shirin returns again and again to the lotus because it asks a patient kind of attention. The form is ancient in Persian and Anatolian ornament, yet when it is rendered in raw clay and light, something in it remains stubbornly present, as if the symbol is still in the middle of becoming what it means.