Shazia Ahmad | Invitation

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Shazia Ahmad, detail, “Repose (Night Aquarium),” 2023,

12-panel, three-colour screen print on Coventry rag with colouring pencil; monoprint, 36" x 48" (installation photo courtesy of SNAP Gallery)

Invitation, an exhibition of screen-printed works on fabric and paper, incorporates a vibrant limited colour palette and printed patterns centred on home and belonging. The centrepiece is a blanket fort which invites people inside to have a seat or rest quietly.

Artist Statement: Invitation is a series of screen-printed paper and textile domestic objects such as tablecloths and cushions and everyday items to be handled as such vessels. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a blanket fort titled Dreaming, which consists of bolts of fabric repetitively screen-printed in a single colour and then hung together to create a fort, complete with a printed backing sheet and screen-printed pillows and cushions. This work incorporates the colours of my vibrant limited palette: cobalt blue, magenta, dioxazine violet, and ecru. This work acts as a shelter for people to sit under, or rest quietly within. The work is meant to offer space for contemplation. My work references domesticity in imitating an interior, be it a shelter or a carpet. This is not a precious object, it is something to be lived in and lived with. 

Invitation continues my exploration of a limited vibrant palette that now spans my entire artistic practice, including painting, printmaking and domestic microcosms encapsulated in handmade dioramas. My work oscillates between miniature and large-scale worlds and serves to illustrate how reminiscence and the passage of time accumulate to create histories. I chronicle journeys through time and place, paying tribute to intimate relationships that develop over the course of these passages. Born in Karachi to a Pakistani father and Chilean mother, I straddle two different cultures and religions whilst living in a third culture. My work is an exploration of finding where I belong. I pay tribute to my Pakistani heritage by merging elements of the country’s material culture with personal imagery in my visual vocabulary. 

As a mixed-race, interfaith artist, my hybrid identity is manifested in my work through my vibrant colour palette, patterns, and themes I use to create my worlds. My nuanced relationship to this identity is nostalgic, holding on to a past as memories of it recede. These remembrances are expressed in reconstructed repetitive elements, domestic objects, and flora interpreted in different lights on different days. My current body of work evolved from watercolour monotypes made in 2021, into an on-going series of paintings and screen prints. These works combine a palette of cobalt, ultramarine blue, dioxazine violet, magenta, fuchsia and ecru. Blue is a central component in my work, giving it a deeply personal and introspective quality. As such, my chosen colour palette is associated with remembering and misremembering, becoming the conduit by which to connect with my identity.