Silver Spiral Ring (Size 5)

Sculptural ring

Silver, stone
Approx. 5 x 2 cm

For me, making and doing is a language of lived experience. In my way, making is not separate from thinking; it is a way of producing knowledge through touch, process, and interaction. I am an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and a PhD student in Media & Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University, working across sculpture, performance, and installation. 

I was raised among the Gilaki communities of Gilan province in northern Iran, a region shaped by agriculture, craft, and food culture. I worked at the Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Organization of Gilan, where I engaged in gardening and farming practices that later evolved into wearable sculptures and object-based works in wood and metal from 2014 to 2022. These experiences shaped how I understand making as relational, ecological, and collective, as my background in agriculture and fine art led me toward a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary way of thinking about art, in which material exploration becomes both a method and a language for cultural and political critique.

I received my MFA as a Presidential Fellow at the University of South Carolina, where I also taught as an Adjunct in the School of Visual Art and Design from 2022 to 2025. My pedagogy is rooted in participatory learning, material experimentation, collective critique, and social awareness, shaped by my sensitivity to material language and my experience as a teacher and artist. Over the past several years, I have received scholarships and residencies from craft institutions including Penland School of Craft, Peters Valley School of Craft, the Center for Metal Arts, the John C. Campbell Folk School, and Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft. My work has been exhibited internationally, including in Iran, Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

I approach craft as both a method and a form of refusal.     From my experience, it resists dominant systems of knowledge that privilege writing, reading, and abstraction as the primary ways of producing meaning. Instead, I work through embodied and material processes in which knowledge emerges through doing. My methodology is craft, and through it, I question how norms are constructed and maintained. I believe in process and slowness; Through this process, fostering critical conversations between individuals and their environments is central to my work. I aim to create spaces that challenge dominant narratives of norms.

I found that crafting with hand and mind is a site of negotiation between the personal and the political, opening space for alternative ways of knowing, sensing, and acting. I work with materials such as metal, wood, soil, fabric, and paper, and assemble found objects because I am interested in how material conditions shape experience in the sites they inhabit. 

Currently, I live in Toronto, and my research is at the intersection of eco-social practices, craftivism, materiality, and gender. In my program, I approach technology not as an object of optimism or spectacle, but as a lived condition that shapes and redistributes labour, agency, and visibility across bodies and environments.