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 engage in ancestral craft technologies and ways of knowing.
Transforming
Foraged 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 work with materials from the land including flowers, plants, bark, seeds and shells to remember what we already know. My workshops invite participants to connect with themselves, their stories, and the land they are on through writing, drawing, crafting, painting, music, and movement.
Paintings
Inspired by how bodies meet the land, my paintings draw from South-Asian motifs, reaching into inner wisdom which is often tied into language, sensory landscapes, and conversing with dreams.
Creative Projects
Collaboration with other artists, creatives, plant-people and communities is integral to my practice. I collaborate with my sister Manahil (poet and artist) on Reth Aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary arts project that researches 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