Wardha Shabbir’s earliest memories are tied to her mother’s garden, to trees, shrubbery, and acts of care. Deeply rooted in her home city of Lahore, her practice is informed by the garden city’s histories, ecologies and cultural density, while also strained by its environmental degradation, political instability, and social precarity. These are not circumstances observed remotely, but emerge from the rhythms of daily life. As she states, “I’m someone who is actually, literally living these conditions and experiencing them every day.”
Elaborately defined tree forms populate Shabbir’s work, each one standing in for a body. Trained in miniature painting at Lahore’s renowned National College of Arts, Shabbir was educated within a historic lineage defined by discipline and precision. Her work honours traditional techniques, while persistently interrogating and expanding their boundaries. Initially, the medium offered both protection and possibility: its small scale, portability, and perceived acceptability allowed her to work discreetly within restrictive cultural frameworks. Art, she recalls, “was like my peephole, my escape route, my oxygen tank.” Over time, what began as a pragmatic choice became a site of deep conceptual inquiry, as she questioned what miniature painting could mean in the present moment and how it might evolve to hold contemporary experience.
The traditional subjects of foliage and organic geometries have developed into a rich symbolic language, carrying lessons of resilience and survival. Shabbir’s plant life adapts to our times, taking on imagined qualities, becoming composites drawn from nature. Many of her paintings include a dark, tendrilled form, drawn from the Urdu concept of mukhi. Referencing the black bud of the sunflower, mukhi conjures the beginning of something, the shape of becoming, a profound well of possibility. In Shabbir’s lexicon, it acts as a void, a volcano seen from above and a womb, a symbol of feminine power and boundless potential. The emergent petals reach outwards like the many arms of the Hindu goddess Kali Mata, endlessly capable of managing multiple responsibilities, as many women and mothers do.
In The Symphony of Silence (2025), the mukhi traces a path through the composition, like wildfire or a parasitic creeper. Referencing satellite imagery and wayfinding, Shabbir’s cartographies trace movement, migration, and her own personal journeys. These routes are not merely navigational but existential, suggesting how one moves through life’s challenges. “There is infinitude in a person’s isolated journey,” she notes, and her compositions reflect this expansiveness. Other paintings, such as Return to Source (2025), construct immersive worlds she describes as “sacred savannahs”. Overflowing with dense vegetation, each one is filled with meticulously rendered details that reward a similarly slow and careful approach to looking. Indeed, Shabbir sees her role as an artist as going beyond imagery, to “hold the finger of the viewer and bring them into your world,” generating experiences that unfold with time.
This sustained engagement with world-building has led naturally toward sculpture. Imagining her plant forms from every possible angle, she began constructing them in three dimensions, rather than depicting them on paper. For Home Is Where My Leaves Are (2026), Shabbir’s research spanned two years and pieced together more than 300 organic references drawn from life, photography, and historical botanical illustrations. Taking their cues from real plants capable of adaptation amid extreme conditions, these forms propose alternate modes of being. Elements such as banana leaves, womb-like cavities, fossils, fungi and flowers combine into speculative plant mutations, each adding their own narrative layer. Fragility becomes resilience; dependence gives way to self-sufficiency.
Rendered in a glossy, unapologetic red, this bronze sculpture is a bold act of self-catharsis. For the artist, daily rituals of drawing and mark-making function as coping strategies, ways to process fear, uncertainty, and responsibility while continuing to evolve. Ultimately, Shabbir’s work is driven by hope: a belief in endless possibilities for adaptation and transcendence. Through her imagined ecosystems, she offers visual propositions for how to survive, transform, and persist within these intersecting times.