To Love The Empty Cup; An interview with Aafia Ali Shah.
21.04.2025 Thomas Hannah
21.04.2025 Thomas Hannah
Aafia Ali Shah’s exhibition ‘To Love The Empty Cup’ can be seen at the Lismore Regional Gallery until the 27th of April.
Insist
Ali Shah talks of the human being as being a “membrane between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ experiences, of the world and of the spirit”. One can’t help but take this philosophy, and the constant pulling one feels between our internal and external selves, into account when viewing a work like ‘Mirror’. Sharp symbols move about the artwork in a calculated and rhythmic manner, contrasting the lighter, more malleable eye-like shape, which dominates the centre of the work.
When working my way around the rest of the exhibition, as if to start again, Ali Shah’s masterful use of colour and of colour interaction is evident, whilst retaining a high level of vulnerability. This is the pragmatic and emotive tightrope she walks perfectly. The marrying of the artist’s cognition and spirit is what creates the depth that serves these works so well. Particularly the group of small and homely unframed works on paper; ‘Desert’, ‘Nest’, ‘Eclipse’, ‘Fire Alarm’, ‘In-Out (Weave)’, and the artist’s book ‘Notes on Communication’ leave one with not only an aesthetic pleasure, but an invitation into the meditative mind and eye of the artist. The ease and confidence of the brushwork reinforces the feeling of an artist creating from a contemplative and comfortable space. We see this used in the astounding landscape work ‘Fleeting or Persistent’, where one can’t help but be transported in place, time, and mindset.
Ali Shah’s work screams with messages of identity, perception, ideals, and feelings. From the contrast of the man-made and the natural between ‘Phrase 1’ and ‘Phrase 2’, to her use of Arabic script in ‘Notes on Communication’ and numbering in ‘Through the Line’. She does not leave the viewer feeling small, nor is she inviting the viewer to try and ‘solve’ her work. There is more importance placed upon Ali Shah announcing herself and her world’s ever-changing uniqueness, with all its “confusing pain”. This is an artist which little seems to get past, digesting her surroundings in a creative, philosophical, and spiritual manner.
Aafia Ali Shah’s ‘To Love the Empty Cup’ shows her artist’s hand, her technical confidence, and her sincere vulnerability. The works are masterfully resolved though not overly polished. They are loose and inviting, while being purposeful and thoughtful.
‘To Love the Empty Cup’ is a look into a very exciting artist, one I foresee being increasingly insightful and sought after in the future.
When reading your artist statement and viewing ‘To Love the Empty Cup’, which is full of rich philosophies of the internal and external self, one can’t help but be struck by the expression harnessed from your introspection. Does art and creativity serve as a release valve for you philosophically?
For sure. I find myself to be quite flighty when it comes to the hard intellectual language in the study of philosophy, theism, those sorts of things. The ideas are difficult for me to hold onto, but I still want to have conversations about them and have them affect me. That’s a role that I want my creative practice to serve: to take this peripheral information that I can give it and be a forum through which it can be elaborated on, questioned, and made sense of. The intention is for the work to curate enough specific information that I can have a conversation with a viewer through it, by mechanism of not intellect but intuition.
When and how did art come into your life?
Since I was pretty little I’ve had this intense craving for some kind of creative outlet, maybe as a way to interrogate these furious, aimless emotions I felt plagued by. I was a real angsty kid. I tried my hand at as many creative ventures as I could think of, tried to be a writer and a photographer and a comic artist, all to massive frustration when it never did what I needed it to do. At fifteen, I had one brilliant art teacher who was willing to sit with me through my frustrations. She was my mentor for a few years. The most important skill that she taught me was how to use my artistic eye to improve my hand. I don’t know why she stood by me so persistently when I could hardly draw to save my life, and was so bent out of shape about it, but she did. I guess she taught me how to access the skill, and since then I’ve been trying to do as much with that as I can.
Have you noticed much change in your art practice since your graduation from Southern Cross University Lismore’s ‘Bachelor of Art and Design’ in 2023?
I reckon my practice has stayed more or less the same. The one major difference is that there’s a lot more thinking time and a lot more very internal processing, whereas in university you have peers and lecturers with whom you’re constantly discussing your work from many angles at once. I keep my family in the loop, as I’ve found it totally essential to verbalise conceptual problems and to observe how an idea (conceptual or visual) is received–and you know, they’re going to tolerate whatever nonsense I throw at them. I think in a way that’s made my practice much more private, and that in turn has altered the dynamic between me and a viewer of my work. I’m coming to more heavily prioritise the specificity of who I’m making work for and what it needs to do to bring them benefit. That relationship with a viewer is something that I’m working on currently to find alignment.
You work and live between Pakistan and Australia, and we see Arabic script throughout ‘To Love the Empty Cup’ in works such as your artist book ‘Notes on Communication’ and works on paper such as ‘Phrase 1’. Is this simply a documentation and acknowledgement of your surroundings in Pakistan, a comment on identity, or both?
Identity sure seems to get itself involved, whether I want it to or not. I don’t like to involve those identity-specifying signifiers often, as far as I’m concerned those connotations of cultural context only distract and generate a diverging conversation. But I’m also trying to be a bit less of a control freak about what my work is allowed to ‘let slip’, and I happen to love the contrast of how the Latin and Arabic scripts are ‘designed’. A comment on identity was an acceptable consequence this time.
Regarding your art book ‘Notes on Communication’, was this intended as an aid in the creative process, or was it always intended as a finished artwork onto itself?
Funny thing about that one, it was the very last thing to be finished. The book was always intended to be fairly self-sufficient. It might even be more self-sufficient than the rest of the works, in a way. There’s an essential part of the puzzle I was meddling with that the paintings didn’t seem to confront directly, the reason behind the simulated text in a few of them. There was a meaning that was drawing me to that symbol (of human presence, turned into something recognisable but not understandable) so strongly. It would’ve felt like something was left unsaid, so I said something!
You also mention ‘stumbling as you go’, are your ideas often realised in your work through trial and error, or rather in one motion?
As with most artists I reckon, my practice is a pretty solid mix. I do have a love for repetition and alteration, but I’d say that nowadays most of the trial and error occurs in a project’s infancy, when the concept or theme is yet to be nailed down. That’s a long and unpleasant process and there’s a lot of information, charming and otherwise, that gets burned off. More words than paintings, but plenty of them too. In this project, once I had ‘Mirror’ done and the concept more or less cornered, the remaining works dictated themselves.
You talk of the “rift that forms in an uneven relationship between spirit and external-facing self”. Have you found a way to remedy this imbalance? Has experiencing the turbulence of being pulled between these two polars influenced your work?
This is unfortunately one of the biggest challenges in my life right now. Rather than locating a consistent balance, I have a tendency to be totally consumed in the external, then rebel against that and swing the pendulum into internal obsession for a bit. Through my art practice I try to drip-feed some level of internal consciousness, but I can’t say no to momentum either, and I inevitably lose the thread again. Once I’m distracted by one, I become blind to the other. Still working on this conundrum.
Do you think there is a stagnant or benign harmony between the external and internal self to be achieved? Or are they in a constant dance, like waves moving water?
Interesting question. I imagine the latter is more true, certainly more applicable to peoples’ lives. What I must believe is the possible balance, rather than an equation of two elements, is where there is co-existence and co-awareness of the two sides of self where they can act in council with one another, both influencing one ‘whole experience’. Using what I said before as an example, that I tend to be ‘consumed’ by one or the other, to me this is an unbalanced relationship – for one side to become aware, the other must cease to. This I believe contributes to challenges of identity and feeling deeply dishonest with yourself, which are things I experience.
You also talk about the ‘blind spot of logic’. Which I perceived as the crossover between the spirit and the mind. Can you talk a little bit more about this state of being?
This is such an interesting state to me and I’ve found it totally impossible to articulate with any kind of sense! I experience it to be extremely delicate and hard to induce. It feels like the merging of yourself with air. Every worldly thing looks abstract and feels immensely slow, people become difficult to understand and speak to, and anywhere you look is brimming with meaning, not intellectually but totally intuitively. It’s also really uncomfortable. I reach this state each time I’m confronted with an aggressive feeling of isolation and longing for connection unlike any person can provide, like how Sufis talk about Love and ego-death.
That particular state of being is where I perceive this broadly ‘Unknowable’ to exist. It’s the perspective from which the poem ‘In Dialogue’ was written, and it’s what it’s trying to explain. I have no clue what this state of being feels like to other people. Whether it’s experienced to look like love, pain, longing, or peace – it’d be fascinating to interrogate a bunch of people about it, but I have a feeling that, like trying to describe the essence of a colour, we’d never really have a clue of what each other are talking about.
A line from your poem ‘In Dialogue’ reads: “These things that remind you of God,
Windows into your heart where all you can see is His Love”. How much does faith play a role in your practice?
Massively. I try very consciously to make my practice a time and place to contemplate about God and, specifically, to understand and deepen my relationship with Him. I find it to be a very pressing matter as a Muslim that my searches for and expressions of proposed ‘meaning’, especially those works which I make to be seen, are always done in awareness of God, in pursuit of His Knowledge.
When viewing ‘To Love the Empty Cup’ I was struck with a great autobiographical feeling, as if you have captured these scenes on paper from a homely and meditative standpoint, (perhaps inadvertently) inviting the viewer into a fragment of your life. Is this fair to say?
Yes, I think so. In the process of making, they’re essentially cues to return to myself as well, in order to recall that delicate core feeling. God knows I completely lose sight of it all the time, practically while the brush is still in my hand.
I could go on forever, but to finish up, what’s next? Will this body of work inform the next to come?
To be honest I’m still stuck on these imitated scripts, so I have a pretty good feeling that that’s going to linger around for a bit, and I think that this concept of the ‘Unknowable’ will also recur, in different facets or different interpretations. Whatever inspiration comes, I’ll be here to follow it.
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