The square is important to me. I believe in it. Its boundary, structure, line repetition and discipline comfort me. It provides a sense of security. My interests revolve around order, language, neuroscience, mathematics, deductive reasoning, geometrical patterns, forms, spaces and the overlap of all of this that I find in the pockets of time around us. By pockets of time, I refer to the moments of realization that we discover in conversations, in walking, looking or listening. Moments that make me travel and transport myself to a world of unending space. I am a Pakistani artist who is continuously on the move and traveling through the multitude of cultures and spaces encompassing three continents to understand the process of seeing, perceiving and thinking. My travels and artistic process are quite similar; they are intuitive with no plan or specific route. The decisions made are quick and instinctive. Process is everything for me. I believe that my practice is refining my awareness. Agnes Martin’s writings, Dutch modernist Theo Van Doesburg’s paintings, Sol Lewitt’s squares, neurologist Oliver Sack’s books and Semir Zeki’s research on neuroaesthetics inspire me. I look back and seek permission from these people to trust my strange seeming intuitions during the process. Taking and making photographs are two different acts for me. I take a photograph to study the moment, space or time that I am in. Later I discover portals which lead me to the possibilities in a photograph to work with, connected to what made me take it in the first place. The urge to understand what I am looking for drives me to look even further. Once the process begins it is like falling into a rabbit hole; where there’s no sense of time anymore and choices are being made so rapidly that there’s no stopping or questioning the path. I completely trust my gut at this point which eventually lead me to a place where I just know where to stop. Silence is hard to find but this intensive, arduous process of working within layers, repetition and spaces takes me to a meditative space. My process is very spiritual to me, although calling it that seems limiting. Recently studying under a neuroscientist truly helped me to understand my process. Currently my work is about the traces of the intellectual construct of the geometry around us. It focuses on the uniformity and neutrality of the banal moments we experience every day, ways of looking and perceiving the rhythm of the inherently repetitive patterns of our daily lives.
ayesha saeed 