I have never been particularly good at staying in one place.
Not necessarily geographically, but creatively.
Everyone around me seemed to know that this was what I was meant to do. Everyone, perhaps, except me.
I was simply curious about too many other things.
I loved mathematics and even spent a year studying pure mathematics at university before realising that, much as I enjoyed it, I didn't want to spend my life there. So I moved to dramatic literature. Then came theatre, storytelling, writing, conceptual art, and eventually advertising.
For almost twenty years, I worked in the creative industry, beginning with copywriting and developing ideas before moving into creative strategy and creative direction. I loved the part where a group of people sits around a table with a seemingly impossible problem and, through conversations, arguments, sketches and unexpected connections, gradually finds something none of them could have imagined alone.
Alongside all of this, I kept making art. I painted and drew, developed installations and conceptual projects, wrote essays and criticism, translated books and wrote a novel for young readers. Sometimes one part of my life took up more space than the others, but none of them ever really disappeared.
For a long time, I thought I was moving between completely different worlds. It took me years to recognise that I was often doing the same thing in different ways: taking something apart to understand how it works, looking for connections, building structures, telling stories and imagining what else might be possible.
Moving to the UK in my forties gave me the chance, and perhaps the necessary disruption, to reconsider what I wanted to do with all these experiences. I completed an MA in Digital Media Management at Birkbeck, University of London, and gradually came to a decision that had probably been waiting for me for years: I wanted to devote my time and energy to art.
Not because I wanted to leave everything else behind, but because I finally understood that I could bring it all with me.
Today, I am an Iranian interdisciplinary visual artist and curator based in the Scottish Borders. My practice moves between collage, image-based research, visual notebooks, installation and performance. I am interested in the body, memory, absence and the ways images and stories shape what we believe we see.
My ongoing project, "The Coveration of Eve", investigates how female bodies have been represented, interpreted and controlled through different visual and narrative systems. It develops through interconnected investigations, moving between mythology, cultural norms, power, archives and questions of visibility. Each investigation opens up new questions, materials and possibilities rather than leading towards a single finished answer.
Collaboration is equally important to me. I enjoy bringing people with different experiences and artistic languages into the same conversation, seeing what happens when ideas travel between them, and creating spaces where something unexpected can emerge. This is also what led me to establish Creativitism, a platform for collaborative artistic experimentation and curatorial projects.
I still love mathematics. I still love stories. I still love sitting around a table with people and trying to figure something out. And I still spend a great deal of my time cutting things apart and putting them back together, these days, quite literally.
Perhaps I haven't changed direction as many times as I once thought. Perhaps I've just been finding different ways to follow the same curiosity.