Artist Statement

“As an autodidact artist, my work and process has always been experimental and reflective. Being non-verbal during early years, with migrant parents speaking Bengali at home, my methodology developed as a quest to find a visual language.

Painting began as a means to debrief difficult experiences as a student nurse. I started renting a studio in 2020, during my first-year post-qualification as an emergency department nurse, when large scale surrealist painting works emerged. My automatic process is a means of self-regulation at the frontline of the global crisis, perhaps an attempt to articulate what I was going through as a healthcare worker. I would paint all night through to the next day, so often after two back-to- back 12 hours shifts, giving rise to paintings of a dream-like quality that may reveal subconscious processing.

Behind my work is a drive to reconcile seemingly contradictory facets of my identity as a second-generation Muslim Bangladeshi diaspora member who is neurodivergent, non-binary, assigned and socialised as a woman and underclass-to-working-class. Through reckoning with these opposing forces, the end goal is peace, first inwardly through an introspective and intuitive making process, which is then reflected outwardly as a force of validation and unification. The aim of creating and sharing work is therapeutic, inciting healing on both an interpersonal and intrapersonal level.

My process-lead methodology is resourceful and adaptive, largely influenced location, experiences at the time and whatever materials are available. Since embarking on my MA in Art & Science at Central Saint Martins, my work has moved into the third dimension, which material such as plaster, steel, silicone and concrete unlocking a new visual vocabulary. Presently I am seeking resolve around my racial identity, a reflection partly prompted by experiences of institutional racism within the NHS. I went on a research trip across the subcontinent of my ancestral heritage, India, for the first time over summer. As part of my dissertation, I am looking at how medieval counterculture, Tantrism, influence lives on today. I am currently making works in responses to the revelations I have made there with regards to my identity and upbringing.”

Fawziyah Rahman, August 2023