By Michael Howard

March 15, 2026

For artist Maryam Bayat, memory is not just something recalled – it is something woven, painted, and sculpted into physical form. In her latest exhibition Unrolling Paradise, showing at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido March 14 thru August 16, Bayat transforms traditional Persian rugs into canvases for storytelling, merging personal history, cultural identity, and contemporary art into a deeply personal body of work.

Standing at the center of the exhibit’s concept is a simple idea: carpets as living canvases. Bayat paints directly onto Persian rugs, sometimes removing their colors, sometimes adding colors, then building layered imagery that reflects the landscapes, traditions, and memories of her life.

“They’re all rugs that I take away the colors and then over dye them sometimes, and they become my canvas,” Bayat explains. “So my canvases are wool and I paint over them. I sometimes use the patterns of the rugs in it, and sometimes I create something new from them.” 

The process is both artistic and symbolic. Persian carpets are already vessels of culture. Each knot traditionally tells a story – woven by hand, often by women whose lives and emotions subtly shape the patterns they create. Bayat’s work adds another layer.

“The canvas that I’m painting on actually has a life,” she says. “And I give it another life to it of my own life, telling my own story.” 

“The smell of the bazaar, the shapes, the motifs, everything—it was always in my head,” she recalls. Even as she developed as a painter, Bayat felt drawn to bring these elements together.

Bayat’s vision is rooted in childhood memories of Iran. She grew up surrounded by rugs and the atmosphere of the bazaar, where her family worked producing and exporting carpets. The sensory experience of those memories – colors, smells, textures – remained with her long after she began studying painting.

“In my mind, I always wanted to put all these together and create something new,” she explains. “So it happens to become this magical garden of a Persian garden.” 

The result is a hybrid art form – part painting, part sculpture, part cultural artifact. Some works remain wall pieces, while others take on dimensional forms inspired by Persian landscapes and garden imagery.

“I started making them into objects, like trees, the Persian trees, and anything related to the Persian garden and the memories of the old stories of my life,” Bayat says. 

Unrolling Paradise is not simply a series of artworks – it is a landscape to be experienced and to walk within, as one would in a Persian garden. Bayat describes each piece as a reflection of different moments and emotions from her life in Iran.

“It’s a resemblance of the memories that I had in Iran, mostly like in the north part of Iran, which are more jungle-wise and have lots of trees and the sea,” she explains. Her recollections evoke summer trips with family, sprawling gardens, tea gatherings, and storytelling traditions.

“We used to go there in the summers – under the trees and the stories with my friends, with the wild animals there, everything – the rabbit, the horse, the fox, and the tea parties that usually Iranians have,” Bayat says. 

These scenes reappear in symbolic form within her artwork: gardens, animals, tea rituals, and stylized landscapes that evoke both personal memory and cultural heritage.

At the heart of the exhibition is a desire to connect viewers with those experiences, even if they have never visited Iran. “I wanted them to have life and to have something to say,” Bayat explains. “So it’s something modern, but from the past that I’ve given a modern touch.” 

Among the many motifs in the exhibition, one stands out as especially meaningful: the Persian cypress tree. “The Persian Sarv – the cypress tree – is the most important,” Bayat says. “It is everywhere in Iran and it is a symbol of being strong and being beautiful and strong.” 

The tree’s significance extends beyond symbolism. Bayat remembers how the wind moving through its branches creates a sound that engages multiple senses. “It has the sense of the touch and the hearing and the eye that you see – it’s a symbol of Iran for me,” she says. In her work, the cypress becomes both a cultural emblem and a personal, emotional anchor – an image that bridges the past with the present.

For Bayat, sharing Iranian culture through art is not just about representation, it is about connection. “I think the world is all united somehow,” she says. “Each of us are different from what our countries have given us, but we have something in common.” Her work attempts to capture that shared humanity through a visual medium. “Maybe each of us have different colors,” Bayat says, “and I wanted that to be in my art.” 

The exhibition arrives during a time of emotional conflict for Bayat. While she celebrates this major professional milestone, she is also worried about family and friends in Iran amid ongoing political tensions and the current conflict with the United States.

“I have to be excited [about the exhibit], this was one of my dreams, actually,” she says. “But I can’t because my people are in a very dangerous and very hard situation at the moment.” 

While her emotions are mixed on the subject, she is not against the war in Iran. “I’m not against what’s happening,” she says, “I’m hopeful the people will have their freedom, I want it to be a free country and I’m very sad because my family is there and they don’t have internet and it’s hard on me,” she shares. The uncertainty weighs heavily on her. “I cannot sleep. I’m awake all the time looking into the news; are my people alive or not? Will this war finish fast?” she asks.

Despite the anxiety, Bayat hopes for a future where Iranian artists can share their work freely with the world. “There are lots of artists in Iran that can’t be able to show their works,” she says. “I want them to have this chance.” 

Here in the states, Bayat is already thinking about her next creative chapter. Her future work may move in a more psychological direction – exploring the emotional landscape of therapy sessions.  “I’m going to do some new paintings about what will happen inside a therapy room,” she says. It’s a concept that feels like a natural extension of her current work; art that explores memory, emotion, and the human condition.

But, for now, Unrolling Paradise stands as a testament to what Bayat has already built – a world where heritage, imagination, memories and emotions intertwine into a woven tapestry filled with structure, richness, depth and personal meaning.