Strait of Hormuz
Saya Behnam · 2026 · a series in progress
This series begins with red, yellow, and brown ochre I gathered years ago from the Strait of Hormuz, the country of my birth. After the recent conflict in that region, the pigments carried a different weight — and as an Iranian-American woman, I began to build, and to burn, in response.
Each work is made by hand, petal by petal, from thousands of individually torn and folded sheets of mulberry, Kozo, and tissue paper, layered with that
ochre. Then I bring controlled fire to a surface that took weeks to build. The dark marks are fire on the paper itself. What had been a celebration of nature becomes a meditation on what remains when nature is broken beauty, ruin, and memory held in a single frame.
Hormuz
Handmade mulberry paper, red/yellow/brown ochre from the Strait of Hormuz, archival mineral pigments, controlled fire · Framed 21x 21 x 6
The first work in the series. A surface saturated edge to edge in ochre, then marked with fire — intimate in scale and quietly intense. It opens the formal investigation the larger series carries forward.

Hormuz 2
Handmade mulberry paper, archival mineral pigments, controlled fire · Framed 21x 21 x 6 in · 2026
The formal opposite of Hormuz: an open ivory field held in restraint, with the burning intensifying into three scorched concentric circles at the center. The form reads as both target and ripple, both wound and water-ring.

Hormuz 3
Handmade mulberry, Kozo, and tissue papers, ochre from the Strait of Hormuz, archival mineral pigments, controlled fire · Framed 30 x 30 x 6in · 2026
he largest work in the series. A circular form built from the perimeter inward, its palette deepening from pale yellow ochre at the rim through umber and sienna into a burned charcoal core — at once an aerial view of a contested basin and a wound. The gradient from beauty into ruin is the work.

Hormuz 4
Hormuz 4 2026 · Artist-made Kozo bark paper (hand-beaten, bleached, blended, and pulled), ochre pigments from the Strait of Hormuz (Iran) Framed 30 x 30 x 6
This piece is the finalist of the ARTBANK FY 27, Washington DC Comission for the Arts and Humanities
The most process-intensive piece in the series. The paper itself was made from scratch — Kozo bark gathered, beaten, bleached, blended, and pulled into long wave-like sheets with extended pulps that evoke the moving surface of the Strait. These are not petal-forms but flowing, directional strips: the Strait itself as material, as memory, as form. Ochre pigments from the Strait are applied during the making process, so color is inseparable from surface. The work is simultaneously a representation of the Strait and a piece of it — water made into paper made into art. I

Hormuz 5
Hormuz 5 2026 · Handmade paper, ochre pigments from the Strait of Hormuz (Iran), controlled fire (concentric circular burns, central burned flower) 30 × 30 in., circular, unframed ·
Available The largest and most formally resolved piece in the series to date. Seven concentric rings of burned paper radiate outward from a single burned flower at the center — a symbol from Persian poetry of beauty, burned. The rings carry multiple simultaneous readings: a target, a radar screen, the cross-section of a mangrove tree, water disturbed at its center by an impact and rippling outward. The white ground between the rings is as active as the burned marks themselves — the space between the circles is what was not destroyed, which is how survival looks

