In the Still Life series, arguably Gohar Dashti’s most personal to date, the unadorned cyanotypes of various plants against a plain backdrop, blown up to many times their original scale, irresistibly draw us in, lulling us into their ostensible prosody with the simplicity of the from; they are at once unabashedly concrete, straightforward renderings, and fierce abstractions. Somehow, nothing about these studies of inanimate objects appears static: the simple, fundamental nature of the form and its contect, the photographic technology and the natural world in their most rudimentary iterations, as the artist disturbs the beauty of the world, and then reconstructs it by hand. The work feels intensely female; the destruction implicit in creation at the heart of the artist’s dialectic.
– An excerpt from Dynamic Stillness: the Alien at Home by Eva H.D.