ARTWORKS

Traveler on a Carved Landscape

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Poems and Printing: Raheleh Filsoofi
Bookmaking: Jerry Bedor Phillips
Completion Date: May 3rd, 2025

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As an immigrant who has lived in the South since arriving in this country, my reflections as a traveler entwine with the land’s own memory. These poems are personal, yet they carry the collective weight of movement and material. They honor the women potters of Newcomb College, whose vessels carved the Southern landscape into form and pattern. Their hands worked in a world of clay, humidity, and Spanish moss—materials shaped by climate, labor, and history. My work joins theirs in reimagining not only the landscape but our relationship to it: through dust, through time, and through the quiet persistence of care.

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Traveler on a Carved Landscape is the culmination of two years of travel, reflection, and transformation through soil. Between Spring 2023 and Spring 2025, I journeyed 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 place. The poems are printed with a single mixed clay body made from all these collected soils, its shifting colors reflecting the varied grounds folded into one material. This clay anchors both the poems and the labor behind them, holding the traces of movement, memory, and the act of navigating (un)familiar landscapes.

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See the dust poems here