The city of Lahore and its role as a centre for miniature painting have shaped Wardha Shabbir’s practice over many years. Trained in the highly disciplined genre, she continues to draw on its conventions, while creating works that experiment formally and conceptually beyond the framework of miniature painting. Within the intimate plane of a manuscript-size painting, Shabbir creates close studies of her local environment, as well as abstract visual fields, to explore facets of identity.

Nature can be found throughout the highly urbanised Lahore — in its celebrated Mughal architecture and gardens, colonial architecture and affluent neighbourhoods, as well as its natural landscapes in the city’s surrounds. For her work, Shabbir engages in hyperlocal studies, in which she closely observes changes in nature and interprets how these converse with ecological evolution and the urban experience. She documents the common trees found throughout the city, the native foliage around bodies of water, and city gardens where nature is subdued and curated. Shabbir is fascinated by the unique sharp yellow light of Lahore, and the colour features alongside other distinctive tones in her work. She also constructs 3D, cut-out models of trees she has documented, so she can study and translate the interplay of depths into the flat plane of her paintings.

Shabbir’s painting practice is distinctive in its rearrangement of the conventional picture plane in line with her unique explorations of space. This approach is closely tied to conceptual thinking about spiritual and cognitive space, and results in the artist forming new symbols of femininity and identity. Fences and boundaries — filled with garden foliage and urban structures — create their own geometric courses and divisions, standing as metaphors for the boundaries, impositions and threats affecting women’s lives. The garden acts as an extension of anatomy, and bodily connections to nature are hidden in the miniature forests of her paintings. The wild shrubbery that abounds in the city similarly features across different works, connecting the struggles women face in their daily lives with the resilience of the proliferating shrubs, which can be crushed when trodden, but quickly return to form. The geometries also form pathways and mazes across the paintings; here, Shabbir references the Islamic concept of ‘sirat’, meaning a path, passage or bridge, as a reflection of her own journey as a woman living in Pakistan.¹

Voids and empty fields juxtaposed against coloured backgrounds characterise Shabbir’s paintings, and recently the artist has incorporated a dark entity through which she contemplates phenological energies and psychological metaphors. These propose a new type of void or opening that interferes with the other shapes and depths. Shabbir is drawn to the mysterious energy and amoeba-like forms of black holes found throughout the universe, and the way they create a veil surrounded by radiating or burning edges. Studies of satellite images of the mouths of volcanoes inform her depictions, and she thinks about them as ‘Kaali Aag’ — meaning ‘black fire’ and referencing Kali, the Hindu goddess associated with destruction — as power that can both give and take life. The black hole is another symbol through which the artist considers women’s bodies, as darkened veils with flowers and plants at their edges, rendered like flames and delicately breaking away.

Wardha Shabbir considers her paintings to be self-portraits, conveying her relationship with her urban and natural environment, and reflecting the pathways and encounters of her life and the lives of women around her. Her organic compositions portray women’s experiences with abundant growth morphing into elaborate motifs that emulate the contours of women’s imaginations, while vivid hues illustrate the strength and vitality of their emotions.²

Endnotes

1. Wardha Shabbir, email to the author, 5 June 2024.
2. Wardha Shabbir [artist statement], in The Water You Seek [exhibition catalogue], Grosvener Gallery, London, 2022, p.3.

Feature image: Wardha Shabbir / Pakistan b.1987 / Anatomy Of Survival 2024, installed at GOMA for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, November 2024 / Gouache on two sheets of acid free paper / Purchased 2024 with funds from an anonymous donor through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / © Wardha Shabbir / Photograph: J Ruckli, QAGOMA