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seriousness and clarity of vision.  

Zarina says that in the cross-cultural world of today one cannot be constrained by political boundaries. However, her work reflects a strong personality that has followed her instincts rather than being submerged in a sea of ideas foreign to her. 

Like her earlier series entitled The house at Aligarh, the new ones evoke a similar nostalgia. There is strong personal sense of being, the artist revealing herself slowly through instances in her childhood or later on through obsessive images that have become personal symbols. The use of titles like Ammi waits for her Motia Blossoms or Saeeda brings her children and Abba comes in to look at us gave the Aligarh series the character of an old family album. The text seemed as much a part of the work as the images, for it gave another dimension to the visual aspect. 

There is a strong sense of who she is and where she is her work is a square of the same size. Inside the square she deals formally with line. Line manages to become the metaphor for the four walls of the house. For Zarina, the formal elements of drawing are limited - a line, a square or a circle. A drawing must work well in the placement of these elements, which are simplified as much as the artist can. 

In Far away there was a house with four walls, crisp black and white lines occupy the four walls of the the frame, exposing the bare, grainy paper in the centre. These lines move into the centre in On long summer afternoons everyone slept. In I run outside to play and burn my feet a dark image relates to its ground by the subtlety of the way its edges merge with the paper. The image in all her works is carefully thought out and drawing on the seductive ground of hand made paper. The rawness of the paper is highlighted by the hand drawn lines - the image and the surface become an integand surety, with the artist deciding how much to tell us. But it is not what she says, but the indirectness of how she says it, that is most striking and interesting. 

There is a chain of thought that links Zarina's images and words, a search for a deeper understanding of who she is. Zarina quotes Wilhem De Kooning, who worked on his women series for years, as having said that an artist makes only one drawing in his lifetimes. The idea of creating only one drawing throughout one's life, she believes, comes with time and experience. The change is very slow and gradual, and does not occur on a conscious level. 

Zarina believes that it is only in one's childhood that one really is capable of expressing oneself 'freely'. The nostalgic return of stories and images of her childhood that form Zarina's language of art, transports the viewer to an enchanting world she yearns to recreate and relive.