Fragile yet unashamedly tactile, Shazia Imran’s mixed media artworks shimmy their way off the canvas and embed themselves in your subconscious, causing you to revisit them — their glittering fabrics and intricately sewn threads — time and time again. Explorations of landscape, memory, and the subconscious mind, Shazia’s artworks are as much about investigating the world we live in as they are about portraying it.
“My inspiration and influence comes from everything I see, feel, and experience around me,” she explains. Born in Pakistan and having travelled extensively, it’s fair to say that Shazia Imran has seen, felt, and experienced a great deal; something that is evident in the multiple layers and meanings of her pieces.
Despite studying a bachelor of design at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, and receiving a master of design in digital media from the University of Western Sydney, Shazia largely describes herself as self-taught. “I have a sound education in fields of digital and multimedia,” she says, “but my art evolves and changes over time and through experimentation.”
Like many famed artists who have preceded her, the phases and developments of Shazia’s style are marked.
Her watercolours portray familiar urban settings in muted, lonely colours; they are affecting and provocative. Her bronze sculptures shine a mirror on our own vulnerabilities; naked and exposed, their subjects somehow reveal to us that we are all human. And her charcoals are raw and gravelly; they capture moments in time, preserving them for all eternity.
But it’s the mixed-media style that has currently captured her imagination and — it seems — the hearts of art aficionados worldwide. So far, her pieces have been exhibited at the 2015 Florence Biennale, the 2015 and 2016 New York Art Expo, and will this month be on display at the Asia Contemporary Show in Hong Kong; they also hang in private collections in the US, the UK, and Australia.
