Nayyab Naveed

MFA Illustration

Go to the Limits of your Longing

My first friend in school was a tree—a murmuring Chinaberry standing tall amidst a litterfall of creatures most commonly known as children. Because of my odd friendship with this lilac tree, everybody thought I was a bit slant in the head. To this day, I’m unable to deny such claims. To operate in the world in a slant manner meant to accept that there was a certain erasure that will happen, just in the way people view a slant creature.

To be slant meant to have a body whose modes of functioning were not the same as most peoples, and a soul that consisted of more than one spirit. Variability, erraticness, and a connection to beings outside of oneself are usual characteristics. It makes sense to me then, that one of the few places I felt at home were with the more-than-human beings who displayed similar qualities; whose worlds were peppered with variation and diversity, and a strong sense of eluding capture.

My work is an investigation into using slantness as a visual method to depict odd and oblique geographies and ecologies of Pakistan. My work asks itself; what does it mean to visualise the unseen– a territory one can often tap into through intuition and imagination, or beings that are often overlooked. Through oil paint, I research into the best ways to represent a world that both corporeally exists but is ignored and erased, as well as a world that is felt at the edges of your perception.

A South Asian woman with long dark hair and a nose ring holds a fine paintbrush close to a large live-edge maple panel propped at an angle. The panel is painted in deep blues, warm ochres, and muted greens

In the studio, painting my thesis project Go to the Limits of your Longing.

A live-edge wood slab mounted on a white gallery wall, its bark edges intact on all sides. The warm honey and rose tones of the sanded wood surface are left largely exposed, with a single central form

The Crips are Sleeping
India ink on found wood

A large print in deep reds, burgundies, greens, and gold on cream paper. A central form of the Flame of the Forest tree rises vertically, visualised as a mass of feathers or flames or leaves caught mid-dissolution.

Flame of the Forest
Reduction Woodcut with water-based ink
297 x 420mm

A devotional print made for the sacred Dhak tree native to South Asia. When in bloom, the Dhak's flowers resemble flames.

Two small prints on cream paper, presented together. The upper print shows a large ant rendered in red-brown lines on a dark golden background with a coral-red border. The ant's body and legs are drawn with loose marks

Chonti Ghar,
Etching on Joss Paper
148 x 210 mm

Made as a devotional object for ants; creatures my grandfather was especially fond of. His love for ants is part of a larger South Asian Sufi practice of venerating more-than-human beings and considering them as intercessors for the Divine.

A South Asian woman smiles as she lifts and examines a looping, textured white sculptural form made from paper pulp stuck on a wire armature, rising from a white table surface.

In the studio, assembling a sculpture titled The Ants still Persist, made from recycled paper pulp and found metal. The sculpture acts as a ghost image of ant nests made from metal-casting methods that often exterminate entire colonies.

A busy urban street in Pakistan, shot from a slight distance. At the centre of the frame, a figure stands still in a khaki draped garment, barefoot, holding a bare tree upright in the middle of traffic.

A narrow street in a Pakistani city, photographed from behind. A figure in a long khaki kurta walks barefoot away from the camera into the crowded lane, carrying a bare, branching tree — held upright

The Trees are Falling
15 mins performance, Lahore Pakistan

My first performance in the old city of Lahore, where I stood in the middle of a traffic intersection with a tree branch and emptied dead leaves from underneath my shirt. The performance embodied grief felt by the female body as well as a tree body.