Hamra Abbas

Aerial Studies, 2024

Marble inlay

11 panels, 152.4 x 121.9 cm each

Since training as a miniature painter at NCA, Hamra Abbas has expanded her practice across multiple media, including sculpture and video. After spending many years living and working abroad, she relocated with her family to Lahore in 2015, which has allowed her to engage with traditional craft techniques such as stone inlay, as well as experiment with the miniature tradition itself.

Abbas’s Aerial Studies are among the latest pieces the artist has realized in marble inlay, which she began to work with after her return to Lahore in 2015, engaging with local workshops and in the process developing a close familiarity with the stone’s variations across different parts of Pakistan and Asia. The desire to document the mountains at Skardu, in the north of the country, meanwhile, came about during a recent visit there that made the effects of global warming shockingly clear.  As Abbas recalls, “20 years ago I went[…] in June and it was freezing cold. This year (2023) we needed air conditioning. So, when I looked at my digital sketches based on the aerial photography I did on a Skardu flight, I found them alarming, thinking of the climate – the rising temperatures, the glaciers melting in Gilgit-Baltistan region, the 3000+ lakes formed there, and the floods expected.”  The starkness of the marble thus serves as a reminder of the vulnerability of the mountain ecosystem.

Moreover, complementing the inlays will be miniature portraits executed in lapis lazuli of the porters who perhaps know the mountains best. In addition, Abbas is also contributing a video of conversation with Salahuddin Mian.

 

 

Porters, 2024

Lapis lazuli miniature portraits

10 panels, 31 x 38 x 3.5 cm each

 

Conversation with Salahuddin Mian, 2001

Single channel video [length?]