KARACHI – A isha Abid Hussain has trained as a traditional miniature painter, and has been practicing and producing original work since January 2008. Her artwork started from the blank white pages of a daily diary that recorded day-to-day short-lived moments, pains and pleasures.
“They transformed into claustrophobic images filled with text spreading like a contagious virus, and an emotional turmoil became a political phrase,” Hussain explains. Her desire to meditate causes an image to look like a moth weaving a cocoon with ultimate patience.
A drowsy pleasure, which amused her while writing endless lines of text, reminded her of a term used for debris or excrements produced by insects, making it creepy without offending, and disturbing but not repulsive. “I want to draw lucid, free-flowing drawing resembling body secretions inhibited within a desire of a woman’s sexual urges,” she says.
Her primary thought behind works executed in the liquid medium is more about the process than the motif. “We live in a grid of society trying to stay focused and balanced under a suffocating shadow of norms,” the artist says.
Her desire to rebel is not new to her as she found it with her first experience as an adult, with a sense of loss and misfortune, and to retrieve a fresh soul in the end.
Photos courtesy VASL Art
From blank diary pages to claustrophobic images
