Nazila Keshavarz uses felt to reconnect with her Persian roots.
Memory lives in pattern. It exists in threads and tiles, in grids, spirals, and in silence. For me, memory has always had a shape and texture. It is soft like wool, patterned like a kilim, and layered like the rooms of the houses we leave behind.
The Geometry of Memory is the name I have given to the inner landscape I have been weaving over many years. It is a language made of form, emotion, and tradition that finds expression in my felt collages and broader artistic practice. It reflects my Iranian heritage, my diasporic experience, and my enduring conversation with materials that carry memory in their fibers.
I was raised in Shiraz, a city where carpets were never just decoration. They were poetry underfoot. My mother, with her quiet and instinctive expertise, could read a rug the way others might read a book. She filled our home with woven narratives. Every carpet was chosen, placed, and rotated with care, reflecting not only taste but emotion and family rhythm. Among all the silk and knotted wool, it was the humble namad, the felt rug, that stayed with me most vividly. I remember the winter mornings sitting on those thick white felt rugs with her, wrapped in their warmth. In the summer, she rolled them away and stored them like sleeping animals, resting until the next season arrived. They embodied rhythm. They held memory. They marked the pulse of home.
Before I began working with felt, I painted and created monoprints—quiet, intuitive works filled with symbolic forms and soft lines. Painting gave me a space to reflect, but it remained one step removed from the visceral texture of remembering. In recent years, I have shifted my focus more fully toward felt collage and textile art. There is something about working with wool—its warmth, weight, and resilience—that connects me more directly to my subconscious and to memory as sensation rather than image. Felt has become not just a surface but a living archive of feeling.
These abstract compositions of my hand-felted collages on canvas echo the spirit of Persian carpets and Persian nomadic architecture, not through direct imitation, but through feeling. Often, a central form anchors the work, while spirals, stitched lines, and braided seams move across the surface like echoes or whispers. I never begin with a rigid plan. The work unfolds instinctively. The wool leads. The textures speak their own language.
A motif that I return to frequently is the spiral, which I have come to call the “Eye of God”.
A motif that I return to frequently is the spiral, which I have come to call the “Eye of God”. This simple form appears throughout my work, not for visual effect alone, but for what it represents: inwardness, protection, stillness, and presence. The spiral turns slowly. It turns like a memory being processed. It turns like a prayer. It reminds me that what we carry is not always visible, but it can be felt.
I see my felt works as emotional geographies. They do not depict specific places. Rather, they remember them. One such piece, “Persian Garden”, features a patchwork of soft, hand-stitched felt tiles arranged in quiet harmony. At the center lies a floral-star shape, which sits somewhere between architectural ornament and pure recollection. Around it, the composition breathes. Threads blend, seams curve, borders dissolve. This is not a garden that one walks through. It is a garden one carries inside. Around the edges of “Persian Garden”, I sewed self-made ceramic pendants. These small elements are a tribute to the traditional glazed tiles that surround water pools in Persian gardens. Just as the pool reflects the sky and anchors the garden’s geometry, these ceramic pieces bring a sense of coolness, rhythm, and sacred ornament, framing the work like fragments of memory.
Several guiding questions underpin my practice. How do we hold on to what we have lost? Can a pattern become an archive of memory? Can abstraction function as autobiography? And what truths are embedded in material that cannot be captured by language?
My work is shaped not only by personal experience, but by the wisdom of those who came before me. I was fortunate to study under the late Master Mohammad Ebrahim Jafari, an Iranian poet and painter who taught us that form and feeling are not separate realms. He often spoke of how abstract motifs in nomadic kilims are not arbitrary designs, but emotional codes. A girl’s wedding, a family’s grief, a changing season—each woven into line and color. That teaching has stayed with me, not just in theory, but in my hands.
Like those weavers, I do not paint or felt to mimic the world around me. I work in order to remember. I work to make space for what cannot be said in words. My birds do not fly. They wait. They listen. My portraits are not literal. They are internal. They hold silence. My visual language does not seek spectacle. It seeks reflection.
In recent years, felting has become the heart of my practice. It allows for slowness, care, and physical intimacy with the medium. I have also worked with ceramics, thread, and other natural materials. Each offers its own rhythm and resistance. My background in landscape architecture and urban design informs my sense of composition as well. I think in space, in structure, in the emotional geography of materials.
With my work, I aim to offer a way of seeing that honors what is old, what is quiet, and what is enduring. I believe that memory does not reside only in the past. It lives in form. It lives in fabric. It lives in the spiral of a single thread.
What I offer is not simply art. It is a language shaped by wool, silence, and remembrance.
It is, quite simply, a felted geometry of belonging.
