KAMRAN SAJID
As an artist, I work primarily in word-based mediums, such as poetry and short-stories. My artistic
practice spawned out of a brimming desire to be heard and understood. Growing up with a stutter is
difficult: the painful repression and the ensuing, all-encompassing but reluctant hatred of my own
speaking voice created a necessity within me to express myself through another means. I had always
loved to fall asleep to the visions of authors – whose fabricated worlds were imagined through eyes
which choose to beautify rather than discard the essential. These worlds are devoid of walls, but the
strength of their seams and the unadulterated colour of their thread is protection enough. I imagine
such worlds for myself in my art.
RISING
Rising is a journey from the confusion of teenage angst to an attempt at self-realisation.
It seeks to demolish the claustrophobic, myopically-imagined infrastructures I saw in
front of me; attempting to replace them with affirmations of peace and coalescence built
on the foundations of painful delineations.
While I have used a variety of mediums for this collection, the thematic foundation
remains consistent throughout. Each piece was created during periods of time that
range from three weeks to six months. I chose to create my pieces in this way to allow
my pain and my thoughts the space to fully form; so as to gain an almost detached,
external perspective from which to evaluate my thoughts. In this way, I feel I was able to
capture the journey of my thoughts and feelings themselves – the feelings which
survived the passage of time were the ones that made it into Rising.
