Empire, history, family and belonging.

How did your practice first start out?

I’ve always loved the process of making, and I’ve been creating art for as long as I can remember. However, I think something really clicked for me when I was making paintings for my degree show. I realised I wasn’t just interested in the process of making anymore, but also in the why behind what I was making.

My paintings started to feel much more meaningful. They weren’t simply about making an image; they were beginning to tell stories and explore ideas that felt personal to me. That was really the point where I started to see painting as a way of communicating and exploring experiences and shared narratives.

You describe your work as being ‘grounded in the critical exploration of empire, history and representation’. Can you explain how your own experience as a British South Asian Muslim woman, from the north of England, has shaped, informed and driven that interest and focus?

That experience is really what led me to these questions in the first place. The histories I explore aren’t separate from my own life, they are present in my family history, the places I grew up in, and in the ways I’ve experienced being seen and represented.

My grandparents came to Lancashire from India to work in the mills, so I grew up with a very personal connection to the history of post-war migration and the ways that South Asian communities helped shape the North of England. At the same time, I was aware that this history often felt absent from the wider stories I was taught about Britain.

The North [of England] is very visible in my practice too. I’m interested in the landscapes and places that are often presented as quintessentially British: the countryside, industrial towns, mills and rural landscapes, but I see them through my own experience and history. They aren’t neutral spaces to me. They contain histories of industry, migration, labour and empire, as well as personal memories and a sense of belonging.

Being a Muslim woman has also made me particularly conscious of representation. Growing up in Britain in the post-9/11 period, I became aware of how easily Muslims, and South Asian communities more broadly, could be reduced to particular narratives or stereotypes. That made me interested in who gets to represent whom, and how those representations influence the way we understand ourselves and one another.

So my interest in empire, history and representation comes from something quite personal. I’m looking at the histories that have shaped my own family and sense of belonging, but also at the things that I felt were missing, overlooked or misrepresented. My work has become a way of bringing those different histories together. Britishness, my South Asian heritage, my Muslim identity and my experience of growing up in the North and asking what those things mean alongside one another, rather than seeing them as separate identities.

What are some of the things you want your work to challenge, celebrate or re-position? 

A lot of my work is about questioning who gets to be seen, and on whose terms. I’m particularly interested in challenging the ways South Asian and Muslim women have historically been represented, from Orientalist imagery to more contemporary representations that can reduce people to simplified ideas of culture, religion or difference. I don’t necessarily want to replace one fixed representation with another. I’m more interested in creating space for complexity. I’m interested in what it means to be British and South Asian and Muslim, and why these identities can so often be presented as contradictory. I also want to re-position South Asian histories within the story of Britain. Migration is sometimes discussed as though it is separate from British history, when South Asian presence in Britain is deeply connected to both the history of empire and the labour that helped sustain post-war Britain. At the same time, I don’t want the work to only be about challenging or correcting. There is a lot of celebration within it too of family, migration, South Asian culture, Muslim women, the North and the different layers of identity that contribute to a sense of belonging.

The legacies of colonialism loom large in Britain, what are the particular rewards and challenges of engaging with and challenging that history for you?

I think one of the challenges is that colonial history is so vast, and its legacies are often deeply embedded in everyday life. It can be difficult to make those connections visible without reducing very complex histories into simple narratives. I’m conscious of that in my own work and I try to approach these histories through particular places, objects, memories and personal experiences rather than attempting to represent the entirety of empire.

For me, one of the rewards is that it creates a way of connecting histories that are often treated as separate. My own family history, for example, connects India, British colonialism, migration, the industrial North and contemporary British identity. Looking at those histories together changes how I understand both my own identity and the places I inhabit.

I’m also interested in what happens when histories that have been marginalised or overlooked are brought into the present. It isn’t about simply looking backwards; it’s about understanding how historical power continues to influence ideas of belonging, representation and whose presence is considered part of the British story.

There’s also a personal dimension to that process. A lot of this history was something I had to discover for myself, so researching it has been a process of recovering and making connections. My practice gives me a way to sit with those histories, question the narratives I inherited, and consider what other stories might be possible.

Can you explain what you mean by ‘place’ in the context of your practice, and what it is about rural England that’s inspiring your more recent work?

For me, place is never simply geography. It carries memory, history, identity and power. I’m interested in the ways that particular landscapes become associated with ideas of who Britain is, and who belongs within those ideas.

That’s part of what has drawn me towards rural England and the countryside. The British landscape has often been represented as timeless, picturesque and quintessentially English, particularly through traditions of landscape painting and literature. But those landscapes have their own histories of ownership, labour, industry, class, empire and migration. I’m interested in what happens when those less visible histories are brought into conversation with the more familiar image of the English countryside.

How does your own experience feed into your work, and how do you balance that with the experiences of others, or of wider communities you work with via creative exchanges?

My own experience is usually the starting point for the work, but I don’t see it as the end point. A lot of the questions I explore come from things I’ve experienced or encountered myself. Questions around identity, belonging, migration, representation and the histories that shape the places I inhabit. That gives the work a personal point of entry, but I’m interested in how those questions extend beyond my own experience.

I’m also very conscious that being South Asian, Muslim or from the North doesn’t mean having one shared experience. There are huge differences within those communities, and I don’t want my work to suggest otherwise. That’s where dialogue and exchange become important to me. They allow me to listen to experiences that might overlap with mine but can also challenge, complicate or completely differ from my own understanding.

I think of my own experience as one lens. I can speak from my own experience, but I’m interested in creating space for other people to speak from theirs. Sometimes that might change the way I think about a piece of work or lead me somewhere I hadn’t anticipated.

That exchange is particularly important to me because so much of my practice is concerned with representation. There’s a danger in making work about communities without actually creating space for those communities to have agency within the process. I try to approach collaborative work with openness and curiosity, rather than assuming I already know what a particular community needs or how their experience should be represented.

Can you explain more about what your work with community dialogues looks like in practice?

The community element of my practice tends to begin with conversation rather than with a predetermined artwork. I’m interested in creating spaces where people can share experiences, memories and perspectives, particularly around questions of identity, belonging, place and representation. The communities I work with have varied depending on the project. I’ve worked with young women, elderly people, local communities and people whose experiences intersect with questions around migration, culture and belonging. More recently, through my research in Cumbria, I’ve been particularly interested in speaking with people from global majority backgrounds and refugee communities, thinking about what it means to experience rural places when you may not necessarily see yourself reflected in the dominant image of that landscape.

The conversations themselves are important to me, rather than simply being a method of gathering material for an artwork. I’m interested in listening to how people describe their own experiences and what they identify as significant. Sometimes those conversations feed quite directly into the work through stories, words, imagery or shared experiences and sometimes they influence the questions I’m asking rather than appearing literally in the final piece.

I also think there needs to be a distinction between listening to people and claiming to represent them. I don’t see myself as speaking on behalf of a community. Instead, I’m interested in creating a space for exchange, where my own practice can meet other perspectives. That can shift my thinking and sometimes opens up new directions in the work that I wouldn’t have arrived at alone. For me, that is one of the most valuable aspects of socially engaged practice: the artwork becomes part of a wider conversation rather than simply being an object produced in isolation. The dialogue can have a life of its own, while also feeding back into my studio practice and changing the way I understand what I’m exploring.

Was your approach multi-disciplinary from the outset? If not, how did the wide variety of mediums you work in come into your practice? Do certain mediums tend to work for certain topics you take on, how does an idea come to be realised in a certain format?

I don’t necessarily decide at the beginning that something is going to be a painting, photograph or text. The idea usually comes first, and I try to work out what form will allow it to communicate most effectively. Sometimes an idea needs the physicality and slowness of painting; sometimes photography makes more sense because I’m interested in a particular place or moment, and sometimes using text or poetry alongside a painting or photograph can articulate something that the image on its own can’t.

Although my practice is multidisciplinary, I don’t see the mediums I use as separate practices. They’re different tools within the same wider enquiry. Painting is still my anchor, but I’m interested in allowing the work to take whatever form it needs to take.

‘Brit-ish’ feels to me both celebratory of the power and resilience of Britain’s immigrant communities, and despairing of the ingrained prejudices and animosity directed at them in the UK… How do you feel about Britain today, as an artist working to explore the country’s past and that past’s pervasive hold on the present?

I don’t think I have a straightforward relationship with Britain. I grew up here, but my family history connects me to India, so I’m constantly moving between different histories, cultures and ways of understanding place. I think that in-between position gives me a particular perspective on Britain. I can recognise the ways immigrant communities have contributed to and shaped the country, while also being conscious of the prejudice and hostility that still exists towards those communities.

That tension is something I’m interested in rather than something I’m trying to resolve. Brit-ish came from thinking about what it means to exist within those contradictions, to be British and South Asian, to carry histories from different places, and to navigate a Britain where those identities don’t always feel straightforward.

I’m interested in how historical narratives continue to influence contemporary attitudes, including the rise of right-wing politics and debates around immigration and national identity. Rather than making work that simply illustrates those issues, I’m interested in finding personal and visual ways into them, through landscape, family history, objects, language and my own experience.

I suppose I see Britain as something that is constantly being negotiated. My work is part of that negotiation, questioning what we understand as British, whose histories are visible within that story, and what it means to live with the contradictions of that history in the present.

What are you working on right now, and what are you excited about tackling next, either in terms of a particular piece of work, or a new topic / theme in your work?

I’ve recently finished a painting as part of my Catalyst Creative Residency, which looked at right-wing responses to a mosque being built in the South Lakes, and the stereotypes, anxieties and tensions that surrounded it. I was interested in how ideas about who belongs in the landscape can become very visible through these kinds of reactions, particularly in a place that is often imagined as quintessentially English. This also connects to my own experience of living in the South Lakes, where I struggled with the lack of access to a mosque, with the nearest one being around fifty miles away.

I’m now beginning a new piece of work that moves into something much more personal and everyday. It explores memories of food shared by one of the refugee women I’ve been speaking to, particularly her experiences of the lack of halal food available when she first moved to the South Lakes. I’m interested in how something as ordinary as food can carry memories of home, culture and displacement, but also highlight the practical realities of trying to build a new life somewhere. It feels like a natural continuation of the residency, moving between the wider social tensions around belonging and the much more intimate, everyday experiences of creating a sense of home.