My observations of my hometown coal industry, my mother’s history as a fortune teller, and political refugee of an oil torn country, and family history of prospectors and silk road turquoise dealers, puts geology and landscape at the center of my practice. My paintings of geological formations examine how we project our desires, imaginations, and abstractions onto a landscape. My works of geological formations often include forms I find embedded in the stones resembling symbols, text, calligraphy, scars, and abstractions to observe how humans inscribe themselves into stone through extraction, mythology, and mana.

My large-scale paintings engage directly with the physicality of stone, emulating its weight, texture, and material presence. By layering pigment, mineral matter, and surface disruptions, I co-create with the subject itself, reconstructing strata and surfaces informed by photographs, small paintings, and drawings made on-site. This process functions as both an act of preservation and transformation, mirroring the ways in which geological formations record time. While my paintings maintain a close resemblance to the stones I study, they emphasize numeric patterns, symbolic and linguistic fragments, and formal distortions that interrogate how the earth has shaped human culture, life, and language. Conversely, I examine human interventions— abstraction, extraction, and imposed rupture—that disrupt the geological and animistic record.

This inquiry is deeply influenced by Iranian fortune-telling practices passed down from my mother, in which text or images emerge from raw materials serving as portals to understanding the past, present, and future. My work amplifies the ways in which the human hand alters, abstracts, and reshapes the land, while also engaging with the uncanny and self-generative aspects of the earth itself. I consider geological formations as natural image-makers, colorists, storytellers, and archivists—preserving both the fossilized past and the evolving present.