Art, Memory & Participatory Practice

My art grows from the body as a place of memory.

Through painting, mixed media, installation, and collective creation, I explore migration, homeland, ecological grief, and our relationship with the living world. Persian symbols, poetry, and ancestral memory often enter the work—not as fixed references, but as living forms transformed through touch, movement, and experience.

Some works begin in solitude. Others invite many hands, voices, and memories. Across both my individual and participatory practice, I am interested in what art can hold: grief and beauty, rupture and belonging, what has been lost, and what we continue to imagine together.

Selected Artworks

The Land Remembers

2024 · Mixed media on paper · 2 × 4 ft

The Land Remembers emerged from my reflections on war, separation, and the enduring relationship between body and land. Red handprints and branching forms move through a layered landscape, carrying traces of touch, absence, collective memory, and a longing for peace and liberation.

The work asks what remains imprinted upon the land—and what the land continues to carry within us.

Tears and Paisleys

2023 · Mixed media on paper · 100 × 140 in

Paisleys and Tears emerged from my experience of carrying grief, beauty, and cultural memory across distance. A human body becomes a vessel, a container, and an altered anatomy, while paisley- and tear-like forms move through and around it.

The paisley—a familiar form in Persian art—appears as both seed and tear, holding sorrow alongside continuity, resilience, and renewal. The work reflects on what survives displacement and how the body becomes a home for memory.

Participatory & Community Practice

My participatory projects invite people into a shared creative process through painting, poetry, movement, memory, and reflection. Rather than beginning with a predetermined outcome, each work grows through the presence and contributions of those gathered.

I approach community art as a form of listening: a way to witness what is difficult to express, create connection across difference, and transform individual experience into something held collectively.

Homay: A Flight of Hope

Inspired by the mythical Homay bird—a symbol of joy, fortune, and freedom in Persian tradition—this installation invited collective creation. Participants were welcomed to add colors, shapes, words, prayers, poetry, and memories of Iran.

Each contribution became part of the bird itself: a shared expression of resilience, beauty, and possibility. Together, participants shaped not only an image, but a living vision of hope.

They were invited to reflect:

What do you carry from Iran that you wish to honor?

What do you dream for its future?

ROOTED: Painting and Poetry Under the Redwoods

ROOTED is a participatory art experience held beneath the redwoods, weaving intuitive painting, poetry, movement, reflection, and relationship with the natural world.

Inspired by the interconnected root systems of redwood trees, participants explore their own relationships with ancestry, place, belonging, and community. Each presence, expression, share, and practice opens the way for the next.

The trees lead the way. We follow their footprints—each of us adding our own marks to the path.

Exhibitions, Collaborations & Inquiries

My work includes original paintings, mixed-media installations, participatory art experiences, workshops, and collaborations with cultural, educational, public-health, and community organizations.

For exhibition, workshop, speaking, or collaborative project inquiries, please contact me at bahar@paintingtheriver.com.

More of my current art and community practice can be found on Instagram at @artforhealing7.