“This is the day of the Islamic Revolution,” Raheleh Filsoofi tells me, pointing to a black-and-white photograph of a crowd of people piling inside a building’s scaffolding in Tehran more than 40 years ago. You can barely make out the little girl inside the red circle Filsoofi has drawn onto the photograph, but she’s there, holding her father’s hand. She still remembers it.

“I remember clearly the sounds of that crowd, but also the smell — this was an under-construction building near our house,” she explains. “I kind of developed sensory experiences during that time.”

Filsoofi has taught ceramics at Vanderbilt since 2020, and was recently appointed to the faculty of the university’s Blair School of Music. The concrete walls of the university’s ceramics studio are lined with shelves full of clay wrapped in plastic bags and vessels that are in various stages of completion. Speaking with Filsoofi makes you want to pay attention to all that — the smell of clay, the sounds of mechanical pencil sharpeners and the hum of an overhead projector.

She can trace her autobiography on Iran’s political timeline. A toddler during the revolution, she came of age during the wars between Iran and Iraq. After finishing her undergraduate studies in ceramics in Tehran, Filsoofi moved to the U.S. in 2002. When she returned to Iran, she had also changed.

“I went back to Iran in 2012, but I didn’t go back as a native or a tourist — I went back as an artist.”

During her stay a decade ago, Filsoofi interviewed more than 30 women potters from Tehran to Northwest Iran, from major cities to tiny villages. She was interested in their work, but even more interested in how they interacted with the community.

“That was a career-changing moment,” she says. “I didn’t really go to see what these women were making — I learned how these women had impacted their communities. I traveled, stayed with these women, learned about their process. They were making good money and supporting their village. It was mind-blowing. Ithought, This is the importance of my medium — to have an impact on people’s lives and the community.

“Contemporary artists are often looking in museums for inspiration, or looking at books,” she continues. “My inspiration comes from the very humble storage rooms of these women’s studios.”

“To me, this was a multimedia installation. I wanted my work to be this way — to impact people through sensory experiences and make them ask questions, just as I had been asking questions and contemplating these women’s lives. That’s when I knew I wanted to work with clay and make things that were impactful.”

Filsoofi makes clay vessels by using the traditional methods of the Iranian women she learned from, but she also experiments with 3D printing and using the earth she’s collected from multiple sites in and around Nashville.

“Even when I don’t work with clay directly, the shapes, forms, patterns, the concepts of clay come through my work. So I’m very loyal to clay, even if it’s not my medium.”

When Filsoofi began incorporating sound into her work, the vessels became signifiers of not just the handiwork of an important community of artisans, but of the sensory impact that an entire culture can have on a person’s life. Filsoofi records sounds from Iran that function like white noise, but without the sterility the term might evoke. It’s more like the muffled buzz of a crowded space you might hear through a shared wall, or the sounds of a busy park on the other side of a stream.

“I went back to Iran and started collecting sounds from all the bazaars in various parts of the city,” she says. She walked the length of Valiasr Street, the longest road in the Middle East. It’s 20 kilometers long, and takes four or five hours to walk in good circumstances. It took Filsoofi eight — she stopped to record sounds that amused her, to talk with strangers, to listen to birdsong. 

“Now, anytime I go back to Iran, I return to Valiasr and collect sounds.”

In August, Filsoofi received word that she’d won a Joan Mitchell Fellowship. It’s a prestigious recognition awarded via a multiphase jury process to 15 artists every year — this year’s pool included 148 applicants from 43 states and Puerto Rico. The award includes a $60,000 prize, which is divided into five years. Filsoofi is extremely forthcoming when talking about the process of being awarded such an honor — perhaps that’s a side effect of being a working artist who knows the difficulty of navigating the system and the benefit her experience can have on others.

“My practice is so expensive because I travel a lot, and even though I might get grants locally or through the university, it still doesn’t cover most of the expenses. So this is a great opportunity to have some financial support — then you can get ambitious with your upcoming projects. But also they support you for five years in your professional development. So we meet with them — there are people to help you if you have questions about navigating the contemporary art world, questions about your career and your work, they provide a network between you and the other awardees, as well as previous people who’ve received the award and curators. I think it’s a life-changing experience because it opens a network and possibilities.”

Filsoofi is open to all of it. Even as she plans a large-scale exhibition in 2024 that involves mapping and extracting clay from various locations across Nashville to create 25 clay musical instruments, her ideal art installation remains the humble storage rooms of the women potters in Iran, and her ideal collaborators may not even be making their best work yet.

“You’re not only connected with the group of people now and in the past, but also the future winners — those who are coming will become your mentors too.”