VIOLENCE

My work appears quiet. The objects sit in silence. But are they truly silent?

 

In that stillness, they scream.

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It’s the loud, silent words held within an object that I’m after. The weight it carries, the memory it contains, the transformation it reveals without a sound. This is what draws me to clay, to copper, to fragments and forms that seem still but speak of things we cannot easily say.

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My practice begins with memory, with what was lost, what was broken, and what refuses to disappear. I was born in Iran during the war. My grandmother died when her home was bombed. That place, once full of warmth, the smell of food, and laughter, became rubble in an instant. I carry that silence with me.

I carry it into the materials I choose: porcelain, black clay, copper, and concrete. Materials that remember, materials that can fracture, mend, and still speak.

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For over a decade, I have been studying war. Not only the kind with bombs and borders, but the quieter wars, the ones that happen inside the mind, or behind closed doors. Depression. Domestic violence. The war at home.

The war within.

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I talk to survivors. I listen carefully. Many speak of a moment they stopped recognizing themselves: “I became someone else,” they say. That moment of “becoming” unrecognizable is what I try to hold. I do not recreate it. I translate it. Through form, through surface, through the slow alchemy of making.