Beyond visibility
33cmx43cm
Opaque watercolour, gold leaf, gold liquid and tea wash on paper
2018
For this work I begin with a photograph of myself wearing a Western dress patterned with Indo Persian historical motifs. The body becomes a meeting ground where fragments of memory and history converge. Family images sit beside figures drawn from the colonial archive, allowing personal and political narratives to inhabit the same space.
Floral motifs drift across the composition, holding private and collective histories. Spices and valuable plants appear in gold, referencing the materials that once made the subcontinent desirable to empire. Here beauty and extraction sit in quiet tension.
The work reflects the layered condition of contemporary life. I live in a Victorian house in England shaped by Pakistani interior aesthetics. Many of us inhabit multiple cultural spaces at once. Identity is not singular or fixed. It is layered, porous, and continually negotiated.
The figure meets the viewer with a steady gaze, inviting not a declaration but a conversation.
33cmx43cm
Opaque watercolour, gold leaf, gold liquid and tea wash on paper
2018
For this work I begin with a photograph of myself wearing a Western dress patterned with Indo Persian historical motifs. The body becomes a meeting ground where fragments of memory and history converge. Family images sit beside figures drawn from the colonial archive, allowing personal and political narratives to inhabit the same space.
Floral motifs drift across the composition, holding private and collective histories. Spices and valuable plants appear in gold, referencing the materials that once made the subcontinent desirable to empire. Here beauty and extraction sit in quiet tension.
The work reflects the layered condition of contemporary life. I live in a Victorian house in England shaped by Pakistani interior aesthetics. Many of us inhabit multiple cultural spaces at once. Identity is not singular or fixed. It is layered, porous, and continually negotiated.
The figure meets the viewer with a steady gaze, inviting not a declaration but a conversation.