Roya Bahram 'Playing House' | List of works

**Lovefool (6 chocolates)**
Roya Bahram
2025
Black soapstone, rosso levanto marble, African soapstone, calacatta marble, orange calcite, 24k gold leaf, Iranian rosa tea marble, pakistani verde onyx, turquoise, caramel alabaster
23 x 25 x 5.1cm

Blue Shop Gallery presents
‘Playing House’
Roya Bahram
20th November - 20th December 2025
PV 19th November 6-8pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Thu - Sat | 12pm - 5pm

Roya Bahram (b.1998) is a British-Iranian sculptor based in London. Classically trained as a stonecarver, with a BA from City and Guilds of London Art School in Historic Architectural Stone Carving, Bahram creates trompe-l’œil sculptures that reimagine everyday domestic objects in stone. Her work bridges traditional craftsmanship and contemporary pop sensibility. Roya Bahram’s first solo show was at Blue Shop Gallery in 2024 and she went on to show works with T.J.Boulting during FRIEZE and Pangolin Gallery followed by London Art Fair with BSG in January 2025. Roya Bahram is represented by Blue Shop Gallery.

In ‘Playing House’, Roya Bahram turns the soft gestures of childhood make-believe into something solid, weighty, and enduring. Through hand-carved marble, onyx, and semiprecious stones, she recreates the intimate objects of domestic life, those everyday forms that cradle care, nurture, and routine, transforming them from fleeting playthings into lasting monuments.

The title carries a quiet duality. To "play house" evokes the innocence of a child imitating adulthood: setting up miniature kitchens, rehearsing tenderness, and mimicking responsibility. It also gestures toward the adult performance of domestic harmony, the curated tableaux of home life, the fragile theatre of togetherness.

Bahram’s objects oscillate between toy and relic, ornament and offering. In their stillness they ask us to look again at the rituals and props that shape our private worlds, to see how we continue to sculpt love, order, and aspiration from the material traces around us. Still pretending. Still playing.

“Roya Bahram is fundamentally a stone carver and, when she is not covered head to toe in marble dust, she is out searching for rare slabs of marble and stone. Guided by the natural colour and character of each material, she begins to reduce and shape it into her own world of play. Her work draws us in with its masterful craftsmanship, transporting us back to the days when we secretly borrowed our mother’s lipsticks. Adult things once felt like precious jewels that hinted at a life of independence and self. Now they may represent something a little different.Bahram’s power to seduce lies in her careful selection of lustrous materials, all in their natural colours, each piece being meticulously carved from rare stones from around the world. She lures us in with her glossy, carved, etched and patterned surfaces, an exquisitely filled chocolate box with gold leaf glistening, and a bitten raspberry pie. A glossy green striped Afghanistan green onyx becomes a cactus and a deep rosso levanto marble becomes a bloodied tampon. It is not all glamorous, but it certainly is a real life lived.”

- Ocki Magill, BSG Director

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'Playing House' by Roya Bahram

Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair