2025
This immersive installation of ceramic vessels, sound, and video engages with the legacy of The Moss Mystique: Southern Women and Newcomb Pottery, reworking their forms, processes, and cultural impact through a contemporary lens. The vessels positioned at the center are made from clay collected across nine Southern states over a two-year period, a sustained journey that reflects on the historical labor, endurance, and embodied knowledge of Southern women whose work shaped material culture while remaining largely unacknowledged as authors.
Enlarged vessel forms echo Newcomb silhouettes while asserting scale, agency, and material authorship. Sound and video record movement, physical effort, and repeated returns to the land, acknowledging terrain as collaborator rather than backdrop. Suspended wires evoke the visual presence of Spanish moss—an emblem of Southern romanticism—while signaling narratives of survival, dislocation, and adaptive belonging.
The work exists between past and present, asking how place, gender, labor, and migration continue to define artistic identity in the American South.
Dust Poems by Raheleh Filsoofi This book is the culmination of two years of travel, reflection, and transformation through soil. Between Spring 2023 and Spring 2025, I traveled across nine southern regions of the United States (Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida) collecting soil and processing clay from each location. These clays became the ground for both my poems and my labor, holding imprints of memory, migration, and the act of navigating (un)familiar lands. As an immigrant who has lived in the southern United States since arriving in this country, my reflections as a traveler resonate with the grounded memory of the land. These poems are personal, yet they carry the collective weight of movement and material. They are an homage to the women potters of Newcomb College, whose ceramic vessels reimagined the Southern landscape in form and pattern. My work joins theirs in reimagining not only the landscape but also our connection to it, through dust, through time, and through care. This project would not have been possible without the generosity of those who helped me locate, access, and understand the soil of these places. I am grateful to them, especially to Reza Filsoofi, artist and musician; Erin Dunn, curator; Naghmeh Goodarzi, graphic designer; Jerry Bedor Phillips, bookmaker; and Dr. Judy Chin, editor of the poems. Poems and Printing: Raheleh Filsoofi Bookmaking: Jerry Bedor Phillips Completion Date: May 3rd, 2025
2023, Varied, Media: Mixed Media, Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire, Oxidation, Surface: Unglazed
At the recent NCECA 2023 conference in Ohio, I recited the names of over 500 protestors and civilians who were killed during the recent uprising in Iran. I memorized their names, using my body as a cradle of remembrance to keep their spirits alive. However, as my body is fragile and ephemeral, I found solace in a clay vessel, a microcosm that not only stored my fury and grief but also offered refuge while I created a space for an aural archive. The vessel's spirit will hold the names of lost lives for future generations to hear and remember, preserving them forever.
2021, Varied, Media: Earthenware / Terracotta, Mixed Media, Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire, Mid-range, Oxidation, Surface: Engobe / Slip / Underglaze
I draw inspiration from Islamic art and indigenous rituals for this artwork. I bite into plates I created from clay sourced across the US. Biting deep into the plates is a tactile approach to establishing my identity as a Middle Eastern woman. With this act, I unearth the buried histories to transcend colonial narratives within clay particles and artifacts. I use my body as a tool to imprint its unique mark on clay with respect to past knowledge and values. Both labor and ritual, the physicality of the action provokes attention to the internal. Form, pattern, and function captured as I sink my teeth into the clay, an artifact from when my body and spirit were borderless, an act of defiance and affirmation. Bite…to leave a mark of existence.  Bite…to change the narrative. Bite…to become the narrative.
Ongoing since 2022, 10'X12'X12', Media: Mixed Media, Wild Clay/Raw Clay, Firing Process: Electric, High-fire, Low-fire, Mid-range, Oxidation, Surface: Unglazed
After receiving my citizenship in 2015, sound became a celebration of freedom of movement. However, the 2018 Muslim travel ban replaced my exuberance with anxiety. I began collecting soil to capture a place's essence beyond its ephemerality. Each ceramic vessel in the installation is made of clay from a different state, and the sound of the same place is emanating from the vessel I have made from it. Just as sound is drawn from the air, clay is drawn from the soil. The earth holds answers waiting to be unearthed. Through the medium of clay and sound, I explore a place's past and present. The installation consists of over 50 ceramic vessels, with 25 pieces recently exhibited. Each vessel represents both an estranged and a promised land. With this project, I aim to travel not to find, but to lose myself – to become a body among thousands, a body in action and motion, pursuing my identity as a traveler while challenging the dominant narrative of exploration and exploitation in the history of the East and West. The installation also includes a video that takes the viewer on a journey, showing the process of soil collection and clay isolation.
2018, 4 1/2'X 18'X 6 1/2', Media: Mixed Media, Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire, Oxidation, Surface: Engobe / Slip / Underglaze, Unglazed
For The Inh(a/i)bited Space, I selected sounds from audio files collected between 2016-2018 across over 1900 locations during my travels in the United States, Iran, and places in-between. Through this work, I invite the viewer to delve into my personal recollections of senses, sound, and space. My handmade vessels of memory, which present site-specific soundbites, confront the paradox of inhibited and inhabited space in the wake of socio-political immigration policies. The vessels with wires leading from one to the other, like the rhizomatous structure, collectively perform a symphony of melodic and ambient sound. The installation disrupts the viewer’s sense of utopia with the rhetoric of the Muslim travel ban and its progeny: disorientation, anxiety, and psychological displacement.
Artist Statement
Bio
Filsoofi, a collector of soil and sound, is an itinerant artist, and community advocate. Her work revolves around themes of movement, immigration, and social activism. Clay and sound serve as her primary expressive mediums, enabling her to create diverse narratives through multimedia installations and immersive sound performances. Her art disrupts the borders that exist between us and seeks a more inclusive world, illuminating and challenging policies and politics.
Her current and recent transmedia installations and performances include (Un)Grounded in Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA (2025); Bite at the Untitled, Miami Art Fair, Miami Beach, FL (2024); Imagined Boundaries at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC (2024); and Only Sound Remains at the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present in Sharjah, UAE (2023).
Raheleh is the 2025 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Projects Grant, the 2023 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the 2022 winner of the 1858 Contemporary Southern Art Award, and the recipient of the 2021 Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University and holds the secondary appointment at the Blair School of Music. She received her M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.