Artist Bio

Nimra Bandukwala (b.1995, Karachi) is a visual and community-engaged artist whose work spans across storytelling, painting, dyeing, and creating sculptural pieces as ways of fostering deeper connections with land, culture, and community. Her art is inspired by motifs from her homeland of Sindh and her ancestral homelands of Gujarat and Kutch, as well as the visual culture, techniques, and patterns of the Islamic world. She creates her own pigments by gathering and grinding rock, clay, shale, and chalk, and processing plants into ink.

Her paintings, fibre-based and sculptural pieces, are intimate holders of seasons, time, repetition, and folktales. She works with natural dyes, pressed and dried flowers, cordage-making, and more recently soft basketry techniques using grown and gathered materials. Her community-engaged practice is primarily with deeply rooted communities (a term coined by artist Sundus Abdul Hadi) to teach and reclaim ancestral methods of engaging with land and materials. She uses play and sensory exploration as ways to create embodied forms of knowing.

She works, grows, gathers, and experiments in her home studio and garden in Cambridge, Ontario, on Dish With One Spoon treaty territory, on the unceded lands of the Attawandaron, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.