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FINE ART By Marjorie Husain Tearing Down the Walls Widely acclaimed printmaker and sculptor, Zarina Hashmi, displays her latest, enigmatic portfolio of prints and some highly original sculptures, at the Chawkandi Gallery this month... [[Image]] [[Image]] Having lived in the West, on and off for over three decades, acclaimed printmaker and sculptor Zarina Hashmi, has been able to make use of the support and facilities that America offers its artists. At the same time she has retained her Eastern identity and viewpoint. Drawing upon nostalgic memories of her early life lived in Aligarh, Zarina began to reconstruct the past in a collection of autobiographical prints created as portfolios. Karachi's art connoisseurs will call to mind the exhibition of Zarina's first portfolio of prints, exhibited at the Chawkandi gallery in September 1990, during the artist's stay in Karachi. The prints, accompanied by a written text, were each dedicated to a family member. Using organic images Zarina acknowledged beloved family members with touching eloquence and without sentimentality. Since then, Zarina has completed a second series of prints, a portfolio highlighting incidents from her childhood. In the series titled House With Four Walls the artist has returned to her earlier involvement with geometrical aesthetics. The vocabulary is stripped of non-essentials offering a structural purity requiring great discipline. The artist explained that as in the West, people spoke of a 'roof over their heads', the same connotations were to be found in the Eastern expression 'four walls'. There is, too, an underlying concept of Hashia, the Sufi theory of self created boundaries. The starkness of the city of New York, where Zarina has had a studio for the last ten years, compelled the artist to experiment with organic motifs: seed, plant and growth images. Now spending part of the year in Santa Cruz, where she teaches printmaking at the University of California, Zarina uses horizontal and vertical lines with great awareness and confidence. The imagery of the artist includes the 'four walls' of the title, the drawn chiks of a long summer afternoon 'siesta', a snake that was found in the house, and the pillars where Zarina saw the ghost of a young boy one dark, rainy night. There is the memory of a child, running barefoot into the garden and being burnt by the scorched earth. Finally, there is the 'hoot' owl, the bird who prophesied the eventual departure of the family, leaving behind an empty house. As in the first portfolio, the nine inch by eight inch prints are composed with 'chin colle' a method using tissue-fine, hand-made paper which is fixed over the moulded hand-made Nepalese paper, with acid free glue. The work forms part of a collection to be exhibited at the Bronx Museum in New York from November this year. The show will be her first in New York since 1991. In the intervening years, Zarina has had her work displayed in other parts of America, Pakistan and India where last year she was awarded top honours in an international print makers exhibition, sponsored by the Bhopal Museum. Along with the portfolio of prints, a series of 25 metal sculptures will also be shown. The forms, to be placed [[Image]] 146 The Herald, September 1991
