Alinah Azadeh uses a wide range of media in her arts practice, with a strong focus on textiles, poetry and social networking to involve mass public participation within intimate contexts.
In 2004, she became enchanted by the idea of textile and weaving as a metaphor for text and language and this has become central to her practice as an artist. 

She also experienced motherhood and bereavement for the first time and this had a major impact on her personal and creative life.

Her work focuses on themes of remembrance, longing, self-reflection and transformation and draws on the influence of her British-Iranian cultural heritage on many levels.

 She is interested in the poetic within everyday life and the use of ancient practices such as gift-giving, Moshaereh (communal poetry reciting) and bibliomancy to inspire both socially driven and emotionally intimate artworks.

The Gifts (2010), a large scale textile installation for Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, commissioned through the shape of things, was the artist’s first major UK solo show.

 
She is currently creating a collection of small-scale textile sculptures and drawings, which both initiated and have come out of the process of developing The Gifts.

She has been wrapping and binding objects  with cloth and text as a form of ritual-come-sculpture. A selection of these will be on show at Flow Gallery  this autumn as part of a group selling show by the selected shape of things artists.


Her next installation commission, ‘Portraits of the Unseen’, opens at the National Portrait Gallery, London on October 15th 2010.