Fauzia Minallah is a pukhtun artist who has very deep and strong emotions about all that goes on in our world. She asks lots of questions about why there can not be peace in the world and what is the legacy that we choose to leave for our children. She tackles and portrays her deep felt emotions through painting, carving and hand built clay sculpture.
Painting since the age of 12, when she was a student of S.S Hyder, (an eminent artist of Peshawar), she thinks of her art as windows to her soul, that reflect her sorrow, joy, anxiety and happiness she feels as a mother and a caring human being.
We first witnessed her artistic skill and wit during the Zia-ul-Haq regime, when The Muslim published her playful and subversive cartoons. According to Fauzia her artistic journey has been very unconventional and very slow. Her parents had recognized the artist in her when she was still very young, but it was much later in life that she learned to enjoy and cherish the joy of being an artist.
Husband and wife: touches on the subject of child brides
With a degree in Communication Design from the Pratt Institute New York she has gone on to set up an art center in Islamabad Funkor Children Art Centre.
Fauzia says that her greatest inspiration comes from a craft of her parents’ village in N.W.F.P, called ‘chitarkari’ or slate engraving and the ancient Gandhara art. Watching slate engravers chiseling intricate designs on slate gave her the urge to pick up a hammer and chisel and do it herself. She candidly tells us, "Call it art or craft, whatever I have put on display are my thoughts, feelings and anxieties engraved on slate and board."
Towards light
Fauzia says of her work, "My recent work is a window to the world around me, where words have lost their meanings. What do words like freedom, liberty, justice and peace mean and what are the lessons my children are going to learn? This is the question that plagues me most of the time. My paintings depict a world where just a few have become so big and powerful that they control the lives and destinies of millions. A world where many have to flee from their homes, and leave behind everything they loved and cherished. My paintings are about these insignificant people who don’t matter. Their faces, names and identities are insignificant."
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For Fauzia each and everything she paints depicts or symbolizes something e.g she uses snakes as motifs symbolizing the myriad of lies and deceptions we live with. She says, "These snakes slither around, decorating my paintings, just as they slither around us, inside us and we don’t find them sinister, in fact they are quite accepted. I only use the lines and form of snakes instead of revealing the whole."
India Pakistan and Baby Kashmir
Using roots to signify limited freedom and ‘dance’ symbolizing ultimate freedom, while she thinks of ‘Eyes’ as the most important feature, because she thinks that while artificial, plastic smiles may conceal but it is the eyes that reveal. Children are her greatest inspiration. She frequently finds herself asking, "What is the value of a child’s life? Why are children being robbed of their childhoods and their innocence? Where are we leading them? What are we teaching them?"
It is these questions that has forces her to make others aware. A pacifist and an activist she questions the motives of others and she sometimes picks up a pen to write and express herself better. In her letter "Remove these eyesores from Islamabad" to a daily newspaper she writes to object to the monuments of missiles and Chaghai Hill in Islamabad and demanded their removal. According to her, the monuments do not a message of humanity to children.
Liberation
In her beautifully thought book 'Children of Light' Fauzia Minallah, presents us the concerns of a mother who feels sad that her children are growing up with images of mass destruction and annihilation all over the city. The story revolves around the under privileged children who work in a brick kiln. Denial to their basic rights frustrate them and they hope and dream of a bright future. This hope fills their mind with beautiful thoughts and one day the children meet a magic bird that takes them on an adventurous flying trip over countries. The children learn about hatred, greed and venom in the world and see monuments of destruction. When they ask what they symbolize, they are told about the horrors of bombs and the bird flies into the time when an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima during the second World War.
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The children see the pain and sufferings of the people. They learn that the billions that are spent to bring death and destruction, could be better used to help improve the lives of poverty stricken people. At the end of the book, the children decide to produce "bombs of light", spreads love, understanding and tolerance through hearts and minds and with this message of peace they turn foe to friend.
Our multi talented artist also enjoys making her own paper, something she learned from Tajima Shinji of Japan, who also happens to be her good friend.
Fauzia bravely acknowledges that despite everything life goes on, the dance of life must continue. Though she can not change everything and everyone, she can try to reach out to them through art and beauty.