“As an Iranian artist based in Toronto, my work navigates the space between photography and painting, between memory and material, between displacement and belonging. Rooted in personal experience and shaped by broader socio-political realities, my practice draws from the emotional weight of immigration and the longing for a homeland that exists in fragments both real and imagined. Through image-making, material experimentation, and installation, I attempt to give form to that in-between space: diasporic memory, cultural rupture, and the act of remembering through making.My process often begins with a photograph of a site of memory, a portrait, or a landscape. These images are never the endpoint, but the foundation. I print and stitch them onto the fabric, layer with oil paint, pour wax, distort and blur, until the photograph becomes something else entirely: a textured surface where image and emotion coalesce. In this way, photography becomes not a fixed document, but a living surface, a ground for excavation.Recently, I’ve begun working with natural pigments, specifically soil from Hormuz Island in southern Iran. Known for its vibrant red hues, Hormuz’s earth is both a visual marvel and a cultural symbol. I grind its minerals to create handmade oil paint and dye natural fabrics, infusing my work with the literal material of the land. This process of sourcing, grinding, and transforming becomes an act of care and connection, an intimate ritual that links body, history, and ecology. I see this as a way of bringing Iran into my work, not just conceptually, but materially. It’s about holding onto something, color, texture, memory, when physical return is not possible.I also work with installation as a way to reimagine how memory occupies space. In one recent project, I dyed linen with Hormuz soil and printed a photograph onto it. The piece hung in the middle of a dark room, illuminated not by a spotlight but by projected light that slowly moved across the surface. Viewers circled around it, their shadows becoming part of the piece. This interplay between light and soil, visibility and concealment, reflects how I understand memory: partial, shifting, and sedimented.”