My work began as an exploration of the randomness of nature; at times, rendering our bodies dysfunctional and, therefore, vulnerable – and yet paradoxically evoking the brute strength of our essentially animalistic, almost obsessive, need for survival,” artist Nadia Hussain says.
Hussain says that she had hoped that it would then, perhaps, be possible to demystify love, desire and other such abstractions as functional necessities.
“At the same time, it reflected an attempt to understand issues of identity and femininity in this environment.
I had hoped to discover some element of truth from experiences and from nature itself,” she says.
However, with time, it focused more on the raw and sometimes humorous nature of emotions and narratives representing her experiences, she adds.
The process is ongoing, and from needing to understand the nature of things, she has started looking for narratives and encountered a need to look beyond pretensions, creating characters, self-portraits and stories that best represent situations.
Her visual inspiration has come from comic books and graphic novels as well as paintings and films. “I am also fascinated by the body and the way it is structured. This tends to sway from purely clinical and anatomical, to something that is more emotional and perhaps spiritual. I believe that I can draw parallels between these two extremes by using one to identify the other,” she explains. Photos courtesy VASL Art.
