Nuha al-Radi, (1941-2004) grew up in the shadows of many great Islamic Empires She was born in Baghdad, home to the Abbassids and later the Ottoman Empire. She spent a brief time in Tehran but most of her childhood was spent in Delhi, the erstwhile capital of the Mughal Empire, where her father was an ambassador.

And then she came to London where we (the writers) shared a flat with her in the swinging ’60s. Radi studied ceramics at the Byam Shaw School of Art and worked with Chelsea Pottery. She began making the most fabulous stuff, highly coloured, intricate, jokey (our favourite word) artefacts which lived and breathed the ’60s sense of freedom and fun. In no time there were exhibitions and plaudits galore.

The diversity of Radi’s pottery was mind-boggling (another word which we coined at the time). There were the usual shapes and containers that one expects: jars, mugs, cups, ashtrays, plates; these would be functional or purely comical objects but all would be in bright colours, have lovely decorations and a joy to behold and handle.

However, then she branched into other shapes and artefacts; large tiles with portraits on them and objects like handbags, cushions and pillows. Her inventions knew no bounds and the clay responded to all her demands. It was a willing collaborator in all her enterprises.

Not least of her adventures in pottery were her murals. The first one was for the Iraqi Airways office in London. Later she was to create a much more ambitious one for one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Within a decade or so Radi exhausted the potential of pottery. She was probably at her most virtuosic and creative while working with clay. However, she decided to turn to other media and took up painting on canvas.

Portraits were her particular specialty. She must have done 50 or 60 of them, but we will never know how many and where most of them are now. Radi simply didn’t keep any lists and records.

Her portraits are stunning portrayals of the artist’s love of people and her constant wish to see the best in them. The subjects look out from the canvas eager to engage the viewer who feels almost impelled to have a chat and a laugh with them. The immediacy is quite thrilling and made more so by their surroundings. An author with her books balanced on her knee; a doctor with a pile of pills; a loving couple with a garland of flowers shaped in a heart dangling over their heads. And the colours that were so clear and delightfully bright.

The most notable portrait she did must be the magnificent mural she painted for the Jumblatt House in the hills above Beirut. It is a full-scale history of the Jumblatt family whose tumultuous narrative resonates in Radi’s vivid colours and her dramatic sense.

Then suddenly one summer she took up etching and did so with her usual thoroughness. The artist’s etchings were quite personal and show an extraordinary diversity of subjects. There are mysterious mazes with densely branched hierarchies contained within walled squares. There are enigmatic figures caught on the edge of a picture with a moon and other hieroglyphs hanging around in purposeless order. Trains of camels will traipse over gently undulating terrain and then there are marvellous images of calm, timeless landscapes.

However, still Radi wanted to explore further, use other media to express her fertile ideas. So after two excursions with two dimensions, canvas and etchings she went back to the possibilities of three dimensions with sculpture. Not straight forward sculpture though, the artist decided to use found objects, old bits of wood, discarded bits of cars, tin cans, the detritus of everyday life so casually thrown away. These were to be recycled by Radi into provocative, telling, often funny reflections and comments on life.

When Saddam Husein announced that graduates could now import cars duty free, a large number of so-called intellectuals were seen driving around Baghdad in Mercedes. Radi had an exhibition highlighting this extraordinary trend. It consisted merely of cars and brains: model Mercedes cars had brains oozing out of their windows; brains had front fenders and the Mercedes insignia; a car was carved out of a brain. The exhibition took Baghdad by storm.

Subsequently, when the West turned against Iraq and before the eventual invasion imposed sanctions on the country, Radi had her own way of responding — her brilliant series of ‘Embargo Art’. Again she used found objects which she recycled. Most notable of these were a series of figures, rows and rows of upright planks of wood wonderfully painted with poignant faces and decked out in feathers and other defiant finery.

Nuha al-Radi was the child of the swinging ’60s and her art had that sense of freedom and fun

When America finally invaded Iraq, Radi found the perfect medium for her artistic expression — writing, in the form of diaries. Of course, her friends were not surprised at this. Her conversations, her chats, her talk had always been incredibly memorable. They were a veritable torrent of wonderfully articulate stuff, the flow of words, laughter and gestures as decorative as her art in other media. And so it was also reflected in her diary writings. They are quite simply exquisite. She published her Baghdad Diary in the literary magazine Granta in 1992 and a book, Baghdad Diaries, in 1998.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 25th, 2014