Soraya Sharghi grew up inventing stories for her younger sister in Tehran—elaborate narratives with imaginary characters that became the blueprint for everything she makes now. That habit of imagination wasn't just childhood play. It was survival.
"Surrealism wasn't just an artistic influence," she says. "It was a way of surviving reality." In Iran, where restriction shaped daily life, her mind became a space where anything was possible. Now, based in New York after studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, she channels that same impulse into her work: paintings, sculptures, ceramics, installations that refuse to stay in one form.
The Language of Materials
Walk into Sharghi's studio and you'll find clay next to canvas, bronze alongside glazed porcelain. Each material, she explains, carries its own energy and teaches her something different. Clay demanded patience and surrender. Painting requires honesty. Together, they form what she calls "a map of my spiritual evolution."
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Start Your News DetoxShe loves the tension between discipline and rebellion—following intuition over formula, breaking rules deliberately. Every material becomes a language for a different emotion, a different layer of who she is.
The figures that emerge from this practice are hybrid beings—women who merge human, animal, and mythological attributes. They're not meant to be literal. They're self-created myths, guardians that protect and transform. "They often carry both beauty and pain," Sharghi explains, "because that's how survival feels. Growing up, I learned to change shapes to adapt, to mask, to survive. That transformation became my visual language."
Reviving Ancient Traditions
Recently, Sharghi has been working with Sofal-e Berjasteh, an ancient Persian embossed-glazed pottery tradition. The process of reviving and transforming these techniques mirrors her approach to identity itself—nothing is fixed, everything is layered and constantly shifting. The ceramics she creates belong to no single nation or time. They're every woman who has had to become many things to exist freely.
Her art is a form of reclamation. Myth woven into texture, feminine subjectivity grounded in intellectual rigor, spirituality charged with the weight of lived experience. It's what happens when imagination stops being refuge and becomes the thing you build with your hands.
