Jewellery exhibition opens at NCA

LAHORE

Shazia Mirza’s known out-of-the-box approach has brought forward yet another breathtaking avant-garde collection of jewellery rich with ethnic flavour beyond borders worth every piece exclusive to itself. 

The remarkable exhibition opened at National College of Arts (NCA) by the title of “Triad – Travel, Probe, Make”. As the title of the exhibition hints, the works of art are a crystallization of what the artist sponged through diverse cultures, experiences and inspiration during her various travel experiences.

It is a collection of three design projects undertaken by Shazia Mirza during two artist’s residencies she attended this year, at International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemet, Hungary (Jan/Feb 2016) and at HOF Arts Space in Bangkok, Thailand (June2016). Within this assortment lies her identity as Homo faber, “Man, the maker”, or rather “Woman, the maker”.

The ‘Triad’ exhibition houses three collections exhilarating in their own right. The first one, the ‘Utile Dulci’ as an attitude means keeping a pleasant demeanor while doing critical tasks. Utile Dulci as an object is a useful entity, which is agreeable or even pleasurable for the senses.

Objects that hit the sweet spot between function and beauty often look quite simple and deceptively un-noteworthy. Shazia’s ‘Utile Dulci’ seeks its inspiration from the works of Truus Daalder’s and is a design appreciation project testing more flavors to a genius design solution by an unknown native jeweler from Nagaland, India. 

The second chapter of the Triad, the ‘6SEVEN5’ is a colloquy between my rational self and my intuitive self. It is a curious query that leads a formal experiment and nourishes in return on both its outcomes and corollaries. 6SEVEN5 was not inspired by anything; in fact it was born out of a resistance to being inspired from existing objects, Shazia said. 

In the words of the artist herself: “The idea of making inspiration-free forms has been there with me for some time and it started taking shape when I decided to use a dictatorial approach in which I was following sets of mathematical numbers in coordination with certain formal qualities to generate 3D forms. It developed further when I started using Triaxial-combination-system to put together simple formulae, containing one set of three variables (each with a gradual value between 1 to 9), and translated those formulae into sketches of 3D forms”.

The third project of the Triad, “NONPARIEL”, is a clique of nectarous neckpieces made out of famous Herend Porcelain, Celadon glaze, natural pearls and strings.

While the signature exquisé of her work shines through every article that is not just a cultural and/or design piece of jewellery, but an expression of that era amalgamated with the aesthetics and craftsmanship of Shazia’s 20 years of passionate romance with creative materials and all possible forms they can take to stimulate the aesthetically savvy. The exhibition will continue till September 27 from 8:30am to 5:30 pm.