Artist Bio
Nimra is a nature artist, community-engaged arts facilitator, and painter based in Cambridge, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Attawandaron, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
She comes from a lineage of women who crafted with what they had, appreciated and grew plants, and valued the lives and stories of materials. She was born and raised in Karachi, and has resided on turtle island for the past 10 years. Nimra’s arts practice looks at reclaiming land-based and ancestral ways of crafting using earth pigments, plant dyes, shells, plant fibres, and other abundant materials. She simultaneously unearths stories of displacement, cultural appropriation, and dispossession from these ancestral ways of knowing and being due to ongoing colonialism and forced migration. The materials and motifs carry these stories with them and we recover this knowledge in embodied ways as we craft with our hands. Her arts practice draws from the wisdom of those before us to dream of anti-capitalist, liberatory, and life-affirming futures.
Nimra co-leads Reth aur Reghistan with her sister Manahil, a multidisciplinary arts project that researches folklore from Sindh and shares it through writing, poetry, and sculpture. Find out more on the project website sculpturalstorytelling.com. She co-published Women Wide Awake: Sculptures, Stories and Poems from Sindhi Folklore in 2023 with Mawenzi House Publishers and encounter with Rahila’s Ghost Press.
Nimra has facilitated community-engaged art workshops and projects within schools, universities, community groups, community arts organizations, art galleries, and mental health spaces. Her most recent project Barkat برکت invites individuals from deeply rooted communities (a term described by Iraqi-Canadian artist Sundus Abdul Hadi) to build kinship with plants and people from their homelands and the land we are on through crafting.
She is currently researching and learning from craftspeople from her ancestral homelands in Gujarat, Kutch, and Sindh about traditional textile practices including ajrakh block printing, kishangargh art, and mandana art and motifs inspired by plants, trees, birds, and animals from the region that have been revered and symbolized within these traditions for thousands of years.
What Waters The Seeds
I would not be able to develop my arts practice without the support of many incredible mentors, teachers, and creatives to whom I am eternally grateful. Sheniz Janmohammad has provided formal and informal mentorship over the past 5 years and has been watered many many seeds that may otherwise have dried up. I have learned much about branching out and facilitating multi-dimensional community-engaged projects through mentorship and training with Sharada Eswar and Ruth Howard at Jumblies Theatre + Arts. I have learnt about reciprocal relationship building and working with earth pigments through Tilke Elkins work with the Wild Pigment Project.
Artists and creatives from the SWANA region whose work is rooted in liberation, ancestral storytelling, and community care that have influenced my practice include Layla K. Feghali (ethnobotanist and founder of River Rose Remembrance), Sundus Abdul Hadi (artist and founder of the concept bookshop Maktaba), and Mirella Salamé (artist and founder of the Hope Sanctuary). Joumana Medlej’s research and work with Master Islamic calligraphers has taught me about earth pigments and plant-based inks that were used in the Islamic tradition. I continue to seek knowledge from artists, creatives, thinkers, teachers, plant-people, and doers that are finding ways to resist boundaries, borders, and separation and build mycelial networks of care, love, and liberation.
2024 – Ontario Arts Council Artists In Communities & Schools for Barkat in collaboration with Immigrant Services Guelph-Wellington
2023 – The Guelph Community Foundation’s Musagetes Art Fund for Barkat, in collaboration with the BIPOC Outdoor Gear Library
2022-2023 – Ontario Arts Council Skills and Career Development Grant
2022-2023 – Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grant for Reth Aur Reghistan
2022-2023 – Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create: Concept to Realisation Grant for Reth Aur Reghistan
2022 – Mississauga Arts Council Matchmaker MicroGrant for Reth Aur Reghistan
2021 – HELD Magazine’s cover art contest winner for Kahaaniyaan
2019 – Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create: Research and Creation Grant for Reth Aur Reghistan
2018 – Paul Yuzyk Multicultural Grant for Youth $500 for The Shadow on the Pavement children’s book
2018 – Paul Yuzyk Multicultural Grant for Youth $500 for Disability Mural Project
2025 – Sacred Spaces: Intuitive Nature Sculptures (Created in response to Weaving Cultural Identities exhibit), Guelph
2024 – Pressed Floral Art & Folklore, Guelph Civic Museum
Introduction To Bundle Dyeing, Homer Watson House & Gallery
2023 – Workshop with Guelph Outdoor School, Guelph
- Workshops with Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener
- Art Drop-in at Bollywood Monster Mashup Festival, Mississauga
- Workshops with Otherwise Studios, Guelph
2020 – 2022 – Monsterarts For Seniors & Monsterarts for Youth, Mississauga
2022 – Frontline Network + Creative Studio with Justlife Foundation, Brighton
2022 – Gather Collective Garden, Eastbourne
2021 – Workshop series with Indus Community Services, virtual
2020 – Workshop series with Reth aur Reghistan, virtual
2020 – Workshop with Dastaangoi, virtual
2018-2019 – Creators Club program, Oakwood Academy, Mississauga
2024 – “Reth aur Reghistan”, solo exhibition, Silence Guelph, Guelph (forthcoming)
2023 – “Women Wide Awake”, group exhibition and book launch, Agha Khan Museum, Toronto (forthcoming)
- “Mannat Tree”, sculpture exhibit at Gerrard India Bazaar Festival, Toronto
- “Mannat”, solo exhibition and artist residency, Jumblies Theatre + Arts, Toronto
- “Jannat”, group exhibition at Gaukel Block, City of Kitchener, Kitchener
- “Kinesis”, solo exhibition, Minds Eye Studio Gallery, Kitchener
2021 – “Miniature Worlds”, digital exhibition, Rungh Culture Society Artist Run Centre, Vancouver
2020 – “Mokhi” and “Sohni”, digital performance, Emergents I Re:roots, Toronto
2020 – “Mountains and Pine”, mural, Oakwood Academy, Mississauga
2018 – “Disability Awareness”, mural, Central Library, Mississauga
2017 – Group exhibition, Anticafe, Montreal
2023 – “Women Wide Awake: Stories and Sculptures from Sindhi Folklore” – Reth aur Reghistan book publication with Mawenzi House Publisher
- Reth aur Reghistan Podcast Interview, Small Machine Talks
- “Featured Artist”, Otherwise Studios
- “kinesis Artists Interview”, Culture Fancier
2022 – “encounter” – Reth aur Reghistan chapbook publication with Rahila’s Ghost Press
- “Embrace” (oil on canvas), Living Hyphen Issue 2, Vol 2: Healing Across Generations
2021 – “Yaadein” (poetry reading), Living Hyphen podcast, Homesick
- Artist Interview, Where My Girls At? Writings on Contemporary Feminist Art (anthology)
- “Artist Spotlight”, Juicedroplet | Interview with Reth aur Reghistan, The Juice Box (podcast)
2020 – “Churail” (watercolour on paper), Meetinghouse Productions Paranormal Caught on Camera (film series)
- “Churail” (watercolour on paper/ cover image), VICE Canada
2019 – “Proliferate” (pen on paper / cover) and portfolio, KROS magazine, Issue 2
- “Ascent” (pen on paper), Nuance magazine, “Adrift” (watercolour on paper), Nuance magazine
2018 – “Bharatanatyam Dancer I” (watercolour on paper / cover) and portfolio untethered, Vol. 4.1
- Portfolio in Living Hyphen, Issue I
2021 – present – Board Member – Jumblies Theatre + Art, Toronto
2016 – 2018 – Board Member – The Yellow Door, Montreal