Shireen Kamran uses a visual language of form, colour and line for her abstract artworks.

Abstract paintings gain credibility and wider understanding when the artist in question has an established repertoire. Shireen Kamran’s ‘Soul Matters’ shown recently at the Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi, thrives on complex abstract musings but viewers here are familiar with the context of her visual vocabulary as she has been exhibiting regularly for a number of years.

Educated in Pakistan and Canada, Kamran acquired a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (cum laude) from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada in 2000 and has since been maintaining a steady stream of exhibition schedules in Canada and Pakistan. Using a visual language of form, colour and line to create compositions she remains committed to the abstract modality to articulate her thoughts.

As a Diaspora artist her works dwell on cultural displacement, her immigrant identity, (in)compatibility of gender roles with inscribed customs and her deep interest in Sufi poetry and philosophy.

She divulges that “My sensibility has been shaped by my experiences as a woman in a traditional society. In my endeavour to forge a relationship between my new cultural environment and my past, I look for ways to interweave self, nature and culture in a harmonious way.”

As a writer puts pen to paper Kamran applies brush to canvas to translate her emotions in an attempt to record, rationalise or resolve her inner ferment. Agitated and restless, or joyous and spirited, her paintings are soul-baring exercises where she confronts her conflicts, thoughts and innermost feelings.

This perspective provides a framework within which her body of work continues to grow technically and conceptually. Having evolved an individual style her works conforms to specific applications of gestural brushstrokes, slathering, scraping and layering of paint during the painterly process. Her vocabulary includes deliberate strokes as well as intuitive splashes of paint, spontaneous insertions of crude patterns in swatches and as accidental marks, random Arabic numerals and varied collage elements to express her cross cultural sentiments. The swing in her colour palette from murky browns, blacks and greys to emphatic patches of rusty reds and soft blues charts her varying emotional intensities from canvas to canvas.

Kamran’s search for self also attempts to understand the Sufi path of love, peace and harmony. Exploring the way in which component pieces relate to the whole, mirror the structures of Sufi poetry. Initially it was Laleh Bakhtiar’s Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest which inspired several mental images.

She is also motivated by Rumi’s masnavis and Anne Marie Schimmel’s writings and titles of her works have often been borrowed from these sources. Her visual language does not portray an exact physical reality, but rather intimates an unseen metaphysical realm through basic forms. Here one might recall Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work”, which suggests that rather than attaching itself to specific meaning, a work evolves through the diverse interpretations of its audience.

The artist’s paintings harbour the chaotic energy of a troubled spirit and this mayhem invites viewer contemplation/speculation — whatever the interpretation maybe. Combining the Eastern mystical thought with the Western visual expression creates a cultural bridge that is precisely relevant in the current multi and cross-cultural climate.

Abstract art today has its roots in the golden age of the Modernist era but the contemporary abstract painting is different to previous incarnations. The most useful questions to ask about contemporary abstract painting or sculpture are: what themes and forms does it retrieve from the tradition of modern art? How have they been changed? And how has the artist used them to express the social, political and spiritual experience of our own time? What is the work’s message? Kamran’s work voices concerns relevant to her ‘self’ in the current mutable state of the world.