At what point do the categories meant to define us begin to erase the person beneath them?

After moving to the United States, nationality took on a different significance; birthplace, belonging, and distance from Iran began to influence both how I understood myself and how I was read by others.

The series approaches identity not as fixed or entirely self-determined, but as a pendulum between

the way it is lived from within

and

the way it is defined from outside.

Pendulum of Identity examines how migration brings different layers of identity into focus. In Iran, gender and sexuality most directly shaped my experience of the body and my place within society.

Working with ceramics, textiles, Persian ornaments, bodily forms, and architectural fragments, I give this tension a physical form. Home appears through partial structures rather than direct representation, reflecting the way place is altered by memory and distance. As the body merges with architecture, identity becomes physical: something shaped by borders, inherited visual languages, and the spaces left behind.

The series marks an early stage in my continuing inquiry into how identity takes form through the ways we are seen, named, and placed in the world.