Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice explores how identity, memory, and belonging are shaped through the interplay of personal experience, cultural inheritance, and chance. Drawing from my experiences of migration, motherhood, and life across Iran, Australia, and the United States, I create layered paintings and mixed-media works that combine architectural structures, organic forms, and transparent materials. My process embraces both spontaneity and intention, building images through accumulated layers of paint, ink, drawing, and resin that mirror the ways memories and identities are continually formed and transformed. Rather than seeking fixed narratives, my work explores resilience as an evolving process of adaptation. Through recurring references to architecture, Persian gardens, and spaces of refuge, I investigate how we construct meaning, care, and belonging within uncertain and changing environments.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hadieh Afshani is an Iranian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Jersey City, New Jersey. She received her BFA from Alzahra University in Tehran and her MFA in Visual Arts from Griffith University in Australia. Her work has been exhibited internationally throughout the United States, Australia, and Iran, and she has taught visual arts and graphic design at the college level in New Jersey. Afshani’s practice spans painting, mixed media, and installation, investigating themes of migration, memory, motherhood, and resilience through layered processes and transparent materials. Her current body of work, *Architecture of Resilience*, explores how people construct meaning and belonging within uncertain and changing environments by balancing chance, structure, and accumulated experience.
© Hadieh Afshani