The elements of Wardha Shabbir's paintings draws viewers towards her artworks in a solo show titled "The Space Within", at Canvas Gallery, Karachi. Influenced by gardens depicted in historic manuscripts she presented those gardens in contemporary perspective. By using technique of traditional miniature painting she interpreted her surrounding gardens in linear organic compositions.
She wanted to demystify the concept of choice regarding human life. A person has to choose from these possibilities - right over wrong, eternal bliss over worldly and temporary comfort, self-sacrifice over self-centeredness. She tried to explain the way out of this mist of choice. She made linear pathways among the vegetation just like gardens of hope where people can find the right way out of the long grass and bushes that tangled among themselves leaving a path as thin as a line for a person to pass portraying the difficult task of living a life according to social norms, which was depicted by her in a piece titled "Representation of an Individual".
She used mainly yellow colour in her works symbolically for spirituality as yellow is the colour of light that passes thousands of miles through space to reach us the same way we pass thousands of life's tests to live a normal life which was acceptable by the world we live in.
She used space artistically in her works. The space as a background, around an image or at the centre of the painting create a new composition thus by moving space she created new space within her paintings. These spaces were in the form of passages, enclosures and sometimes even light.
Different configurations of well-trimmed hedges and other motifs represented the state of mind: the barriers that block our development, the path we follow through life, or the destination we aim for.
She painted structures by tiny leaves and tall grass with beautiful shades of greens - a colour dominating her works other than yellow. In some of her works she used sky blue to symbolise skies and water both closely related to life while a few in red and orange.
She was also fascinated by a dot how countless dots came together as a unit to form an idea on a surface to her dot symbolize infinity. The dots join to form a line, which then taken as a single object, which has self-perpetuating medium of self-realization. This can easily be understood by a diptych titled "Epiphany of a Dot". Linearity of a path is the basis for a shape that can multiply and form a pattern, implying the path's infinitude, which was portrayed in painting titled "Leaf Lined".
(The writer can be reached at nadeemzuberi71@gmail.com)