My work draws on the stories I heard growing up in my parents’ home in Tehran. Unable to visit or return to Iran due to religious persecution, I have established a connection with this ghost homeland through the process of painting. My paintings are reconstructed psychological spaces based on imagination, invention, and my family’s collective memory. Constructing these images provides an arena for experience—it is a way for me to participate in a time and place I am otherwise barred from visiting. The process of making these images repairs a certain sense of cultural amputation from my place of origin.