75. Boris Aldridge, Blue Forest
In the 13th century in present-day Iran, whole buildings were gloriously covered with elaborate geometric tiles that fit together like a puzzle. Each tile’s lustre finish required many hours of painstaking labor. How unlikely, then—and how wonderful—that a 21st-century Irish ceramicist, besotted with that medieval art, creates these stunning odes to it. His tiles include fanciful golden animals of his own imagining, and the words encircling each tile are not drawn from ancient sacred texts, but from the man's own poetry and songwriting: “I’m always dreaming of a place to call home, where the mountains meet the sky.”
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