Leila Zolfalipour is a visual artist born in Iran and based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work explores identity, cultural heritage, multiculturalism, and our connection to the natural world. Through painting, sculpture, and digital media, she reinterprets Persian motifs and weaving traditions, with a particular focus on the untold stories of women who, historically, created intricate Persian carpets but remained unrecognized.

Weaving Memory is an interdisciplinary exhibition that reimagines Persian carpets as vessels of cultural memory, identity, and adaptation. This body of work honours the untold stories of the women who wove these intricate textiles, creators whose names were never recorded, yet whose artistry formed a deep part of Persian visual heritage.

Born in Iran and now based in Edmonton, I explore the cultural hybridity of life between two landscapes. By combining traditional Persian aesthetics with natural materials from Alberta’s environment, wood, clay, and mud, I bridge ancestral memory with my current reality. The project aims to reflect how cultural identity is both shaped and reshaped by geography, tradition, and contemporary life.

This exhibition celebrates multiculturalism in Canada, investigating how diverse stories can coexist and enrich one another. It also addresses how art, especially women’s craft practices, functions as a resilient thread of cultural continuity, despite erasure, migration, or change.