In Conversation: Maryam Ghoreishi & Maedeh Tafvizi
Maryam Ghoreishi: Maedeh, thank you for being here. Your work has such a distinct presence; grounded, intentional, and emotionally direct. Let’s begin with your relationship to clay. What drew you to it in the first place?
Maedeh Tafvizi: It didn’t start with love. It was slow and kind of unromantic. I was studying Islamic art, mostly focusing on historical ceramics, and I was more drawn to the structure and science of it than to the idea of being an artist. I thought I’d end up in research or design something clean, something behind the scenes. But then I touched the clay. Not to make something perfect, but just to experiment. And it was completely different. It pushed back. It held onto things. It responded. And somehow, I started trusting it more than I trusted language. I wasn’t trying to express anything profound; I was just trying to make sense of things I couldn’t quite name. Over time, it became the only space where I didn’t feel the need to explain myself. It felt like clay let me stay in tension between control and collapse, ritual and impulse and that’s still where I feel most present.
MG: There’s a clear sense of repetition and rhythm in your pieces, almost like choreography. Where do those gestures come from?
MT: I think they come from living inside someone else’s rhythm for years. I grew up watching my mother; her hands had a routine, a discipline, a kind of quiet power. She didn’t call it art. She wouldn’t even think of it that way. But there was beauty and structure in how she cleaned, folded, watered plants, and arranged plates. It was never performative; it was intimate. And it stuck with me. I didn’t realize how deeply those movements had settled into my body until I started making work that depended on repetition. I find myself doing the same motion over and over again in the studio, not because it’s efficient, but because it feels right. Sometimes I’ll stop mid-process and realize I’ve been reenacting something from childhood, something domestic, unnoticed. And I don’t try to interrupt it. I let it live at work.
MG: Your work often explores absence; what’s left behind, what can’t be named. How does that show up in the forms you create?
MT: I’m not trying to illustrate loss, but it’s always there. I’m drawn to things that feel incomplete or slightly off. A form that tilts, a glaze that stops short, a crack that wasn’t fixed. I want the work to hold space for what doesn’t resolve. There’s a kind of honesty in things that remain unfinished. For me, that’s closer to how memory works; how displacement works. You don’t get the whole picture. You just carry what you can.
MG: You’ve exhibited work in New York, California, Rhode Island, Philadelphia and are preparing for international shows, including the 2026 Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival and the Tallinn Design Festival. How have these opportunities shaped how you approach your practice?
MT: These invitations are important to me not just professionally, but emotionally. The show in New York was the first time I felt the work land somewhere unfamiliar. The people looking at it didn’t share my references. They didn’t grow up where I did. That distance was scary at first, but it taught me how to let the work speak for itself without me translating it all the time. Sharjah feels different. It’s not just a geographic connection, it's a space where Islamic material culture is part of the air. I don’t feel like I need to contextualize the presence of ritual, or justify why a form repeats. That changes how I make, how I edit, how I install. Tallinn will be another shift. That’s more about contemporary design, abstraction, texture. I’m curious to see what questions the work raises there.
Every time the work travels, it teaches me what to keep and what to let go of. I don’t believe in making work for a specific audience, but I do care about how it lands, where it opens, where it resists, where it invites someone to pause.
MG: You’ve moved between sculpture, installation, and now performance. How do you decide what form a project needs to take?
MT: I rarely decide at the beginning. A project might start with a sensation of something physical I remember, like a weight on my chest or the texture of woven rope. Sometimes I just start making small objects, and they tell me how they want to live in space. Other times, I build the space first and let the work find its way into it.
Performance showed up when I couldn’t sit still with the objects anymore. I needed to move with them. I didn’t want it to be theatrical. I wasn't trying to perform meaning. I just wanted to see what happens when the body enters the work not as decoration, but as part of the grief, the ritual, the repetition. And I still don’t know exactly what it is. That’s why I keep doing it.
MG: Tell me about your current project. What are you building, and what is it asking of you?
MT: It’s a large-scale ceramic installation exploring the idea of emotional pilgrimage. I’m thinking about returning not in a religious sense, but as a kind of slow movement toward something unstable. The installation will be built from fragments of pieces that look like they survived something. They’ll be scattered, suspended, placed low to the ground, so the viewer has to move carefully. It’s asking me to stay uncomfortable. It’s not coming together easily. I’m letting the form stay unresolved for now, which is hard for someone like me. But it feels honest. The material carries weight -literal and emotional- and I’m trying not to force it into something neat. It’s a kind of surrender, but also a confrontation with what I still don’t have answers for.
MG: When people experience your work, what do you hope stays with them?
MT: I hope they don’t rush through it. That’s all. I’m not trying to make work that delivers a message or tells a story in a linear way. I want people to feel the slowness of it, the repetition, the density. I want them to notice how something cracked is still holding its shape. If they leave with a question, or even a sensation they can’t quite explain something physical, something lingering; I feel like the work has done what it needed to do.
MG: Thank you very much Maede. It was a pleasure to have a conversation about your works and learn more about your artistic approach.
