(Un)Grounded: Raheleh Filsoofi
May 30 – toSeptember 7, 2025
Jepson Center - Telfair Museum
Photo: Courtesy of Telfair Museum
(Un)Grounded brings together vessels, clay prints, sound, and video to explore land, labor, and belonging through the perspective of a Middle Eastern immigrant woman working in the American South. In this exhibition, Raheleh Filsoofi traces her own movement across nine Southern states alongside the legacy of the Newcomb Pottery women—artists and decorators whose quiet labor shaped an enduring visual language of the region. Rather than seeking direct parallels, she turns to resonance: shared ground, shared touch, and the points where histories rest in the land.
Having gathered and processed clay from these Southern sites over two years, Filsoofi approaches the region as an archive shaped by women’s craft, endurance, and deep engagement with place. Spanish moss appears throughout the work as a living metaphor for this history—suspended, adaptive, and carrying memory across branches and generations. Her works speak with the Newcomb women across time, extending their legacy through the same clay and the same Southern terrain—materials she now encounters through her own movement across the region.
Un)Grounded is a meditation on how women inhabit place, how land holds memory, and how movement sharpens the desire for rootedness. It honors the hands that shaped the South and asks: What grounds us across distance? What traces remain in the soil? And how do we meet the past in the materials that endure?
(Un)Grounded, 2023-2025
Ceramic Objects, Wire, Sound and Video
Handmade ceramic vessels hold fragments of sound gathered across Southern states, becoming containers of resonance and trace. The wires, resembling strands of Spanish moss, connect the vessels to the ceiling, creating a suspended network that echoes the region’s tangled landscapes. The soundscape functions as an orchestra of the South—field recordings merging with music composed by Reza Filsoofi—to form an immersive space of listening.
Fragments of landscape appear as a moving collage, edited by Ali Ahmadi, tracing the artist’s drive to understand place through navigation, listening, and witnessing. Here, landscape becomes imagined—assembled from perception and memory rather than fixed geography.
An Imagined Landscape, 2025
Argillotypes (dust on paper)
An Imagined Landscape is a trio of argillotypes, or dust printed on paper, that solidify the temporary nature of dust into a permanent means of expression. These prints, both poems and image, consider Filsoofi’s relationship to the land through regional features such as the live oak and Spanish moss decorating the vessels in The Moss Mystique. Using the literal soil as her artistic medium, Filsoofi examines her own role in the place she currently calls home
Traveler on a Carved Landscape, 2023-2025
Paper, argillotypes (dust on paper), glass
Book Maker: Bedor Phillips
This artist book stands at the intersection of Filsoofi’s practice as a collector and archivist and her innovation as an artist. Titled Traveler on a Carved Landscape, a line taken from one of her dust poems, the book holds glass vessels of soil collected from her journey to nine states across the Southeast. In addition, the book holds several sheets of argillotypes, her unique way of making clay into permanent images and text.