Hello and Welcome
My name is Nimra and I am a Pakistani artist based on Turtle Island (Canada).
I create art with natural materials and facilitate community-based art workshops that combine storytelling, ancestral crafts and artmaking.
Transforming Materials
For thousands of years we have lived with and as part of the land. Our hands have been transforming plants, minerals, roots, and shells into food, medicine, shelter, and crafts. We have painted with colours from the earth as adornment, ritual, and storytelling. These ways of knowing have been forcibly taken away from many of us somewhere along our lineages. However our hands remember how to grind soft rock into pigment or sculpt or dye fabric and this knowing returns to us as we engage in these ancestral communal crafts.
Workshops
I facilitate community-engaged art workshops where we collaborate with our more-than-human neighbours – flowers, plants, bark, seeds and shells to (re) member what we already know. My workshops invite participants to connect with themselves, their stories, and the lands they are from and on through storytelling, painting, crafting, drawing, movement, music, and nourishing food.
Paintings
Inspired by how bodies meet the land, my paintings draw from textile motifs, Islamic geometric motifs, and biomorphic patterns, reaching into inner wisdom which is often tied into language, sensory landscapes, and conversing with dreams.
This painting is a collaboration between plants, rocks, and hands. I dyed the paper with black walnut and created indigo paint with indigo plants I had grown. I processed shale grey earth pigment, and white chalk into paints, both found on walks. I used gold created by Beam Paints to bring the piece together.
Creative Projects
Collaboration with other artists, creatives, plant-people and communities is integral to my practice.
From 2019-2024 I collaborated with my sister and Poet Manahil on Reth Aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary arts project that researched folklore from Sindh through sculpture and poetry.
To book a workshop, discuss a collaboration or just to say hello.
Web Illustrations created by Nimra. Website developed by Evan Buckiewicz