ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN YOULIN MAGAZINE
Expressive Arts are instrumental as the process of creating empowers the maker, restoring their abilities to process their emotional state as a transformative experience. Through these powerful visualisations artists are able to express their deepest feelings that are often hidden or subconsciously anchored in our sense of self. Sana Dar’s solo presentation “Stories In Colour" displayed at 8B2 by Fatima Hamid opened on 8th of October 2022, showcasing works the artist created during the pandemic. With a long-standing relationship with mark making, using hand-cut paper and painting using the rorschach-esque technique, the artist designs a duality of texture and motifs highlighting the tactility of the medium. The creative process here is meditative, controlled and hypnotic as the artist allows herself to generate playful and fluid paintings, pairing them with layers of laborious hand cut paper designs.
The vibrant primary colours are repeated throughout the series, carrying the emotive immediacy of the present, while the intricately cut sections create a metaphor for the passage of time. The fine cut line work moves from stark white into painterly sections of colour, creating a sense of motion and direction for the colour. The rectangle framing continues in the majority of the work, but in the large scale piece, “The Other Side of This Life”, we encounter a circle hanging away from the wall revealing the back as part of the work. This spherical object has a celestial quality, nebulous clouds of colour travelling across the picture plane while the golden hues of the cutwork radiate a warm glow. The back of the piece resembles the moon, as craters and crevices create an otherworldly topography.
The artist’s practice has become an integral coping mechanism to process experiences charged with psychology and the changing realities of her life. Having moved cities and while being open to embracing change, anxieties inevitably surfaced. The desire to be surrounded by nature is evident in the titling of the work, yet the hesitation to encounter the outside work have been woven into pieces such as “The Secret in the Garden”, where a view from a window frame comes into focus that is looking over a scenic patch of landscape in the distance. Being based in Islamabad, the artist is surrounded by the lush rolling green hills of the Margallas that have found their way into her painterly abstractions. The pathways and foliage echoed by the green hues in “Primordial Jungle”, paired by delicate constellations of painted dots that are a new occurrence in the artist’s creative process.
In “Cosmic Citadel” there is a visible explosion of colour taking the form of an oblong shape, where the hand cut paper takes on a painterly form surrounded by a galaxy of painted dots that create a sublimity of depth. An analogy of an internal emotional implosion carefully collaged to create a structure that is charged with sculptural quality. The vulnerability of the medium being fine cut paper is further emphasised by the introduction of coloured thread hand woven in an action of covering and mending. This concealment through thread creates texture and depth that allows the artist to revisit the medium of hand cut paper in a new experience of mark making. There is rhythm and harmony within the body of work that comes from the meticulous colour compositions and deliberate revealing of void space through hand cut paper techniques. As is seen in the piece, “Puzzle With A Piece Missing”, which takes on the background situated outside its psychical parameters. The artist created its painterly centre using the Rorschach technique, and has pasted the second paper at the back which translates as bleed through mirror image of the painting. Balance here is another key characteristic of these compositions, as they push the boundaries and tension between naked white space and bright combination of coloured paints.
The spaces breaking through the hand cut paper bring the outside environment in conversation with the internal scape of the piece. A bending of reality surfaces where the viewer travels between the exterior and interior seamlessly. Gallery 8B2 by Fatima Hamid has large windows that allow ample natural light to sweep the space, the infinite echoes of reflections create their own visual layer onto the works that mirror their language. The surrounding foliage nestled outside the gallery windows layers the works with its reflection, allowing the colour and form to travel with the viewer. The collaged sections of the works use painterly and patterned pieces to layer the composition in “Lost and Found”, “Flight” and “The Secret in the Soil”, whereas the paint textures are heavy and visible, immediate and continuously changing.
Through these hypnotic examinations, the artist creates a personalised methodology of observations working with colour, light and spatial realities. In “The Parts in the Sum of the Whole'', the excess of her hand cut paper works has been densely packed, over-layering deliberately and increasing the weight of her white on white signature style while the colourful wisps of paint remain at the core of the piece. These journalistic memories of the artist are captured in each of her works as a testimony of her psychological resilience and transformative visualisations of her life experiences.
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