Hanieh Darvishian

Studio

Process

These are the earliest stages of Later — monoprints and collages made while the work was still finding its shape. At this point nothing is fixed: I am pulling prints, cutting them apart, and moving the pieces around to see which arrangements hold. Composition is worked out by hand rather than planned in advance, and the decisions happen on the table.

I keep this stage visible because it is where most of the thinking happens. A shape that seems wrong in one position becomes necessary in another, and much of what is made here never reaches the finished work. What remains carries the marks of that trial: overlaps, provisional edges, and arrangements that were tested before they settled.

Art history & material culture

Research

Artist, researcher, and MFA graduate specializing in Persian textiles, cultural memory, material culture, and gendered labor in art history. My academic and artistic practice moves between studio work and art historical research, focusing on the ways memory, identity, and cultural histories are carried through images, objects, and ornamentation.

Drawing from semiotics, feminist art history, and material culture studies, my work investigates how visual patterns and material forms function as carriers of memory across time, migration, and displacement.

June 2026

Artist Statement

I make work about the things we carry, the things we leave behind, and the emotional weight that ordinary objects can hold. My practice comes from a deep attention to domestic spaces, memory, displacement, and the quiet traces of lived experience. As an Iranian artist, I am interested in how personal and collective histories appear through fragments: a pattern, a surface, a room, a piece of fabric, a reflection, or an object that remains after everything else has changed.

Through printmaking, mixed media, drawing, and installation, I build layered images that move between presence and absence. My work often begins with familiar domestic forms, but these spaces are never fully stable. They appear interrupted, incomplete, or suspended, reflecting the uncertainty of home, return, and belonging. Persian patterns, carpets, wallpapers, and decorative motifs enter my work as visual memories of place. They act as fragments of home, but also as signs of distance, longing, and survival.

I am drawn to materials and processes that hold traces: impressions, stains, layers, erasures, and reflective surfaces. These qualities allow me to think about memory not as something fixed, but as something fragile, shifting, and constantly reconstructed. In my work, objects are not simply belongings; they become witnesses to absence, care, grief, and resilience.

My practice is shaped by the experience of living between places and by the knowledge that home can be both deeply remembered and deeply unstable. I use art as a way to hold what cannot be fully preserved, to give form to uncertainty, and to create spaces where loss, attachment, and hope can exist together.

Hanieh Darvishian · June 2026