The Edges and Corners within a Day and Night

Seher Shah. The Edges and Corners within a Day and Night (کنارے و گوشے روز و شب کے اندر). Graphite on paper, 2020.

One of the most compelling visual representations of life under lockdown thus far, in these new drawings, Architect and Artist Seher Shah casts fresh light on domestic interiors during this period of quarantine. The result is one of visceral discomfort and agitation: those gloriously sharp corners and jagged edges poignantly convey the unease of having the constant stressor of the coronavirus looming in the background. This agitation is amplified still more by those irregular lines that give that palpable sense of being hemmed in as we remain confined to our homes. Reassuringly, the quiet repetition throughout, which is thoughtfully rendered by the soft graphite cross-hatch Seher has employed in these drawings, captures what many of us will be experiencing at present with days and nights seemingly lost to one another. Days appear to collapse into days, weeks into weeks, and months into months within this atmosphere of heightened domesticity as we spend more time inside the home.

Reflecting on how lockdown has informed artistic processes, and this work, in particular, Seher explains that, "I am thinking through how the continued lockdown will impact the drawings since there is a relationship between drawing, anxiety, time and materiality for me. I've been working on smaller drawings in between domestic chores that have a lot to do with the slow application of graphite lines to create a pale cross-hatch build up. The scale of interior domestic walls and the progression of the day into night and it's repetition seems to have a strange echo in the drawings." Seher's attention to the 'scale of interior domestic walls' is fitting for an artist who has the distinct perspective of being a trained architect as well as having worked as an architect for several years in New York City. Her and her husband Randhir Singh's remarkable cyanotype prints of brutalist buildings are likewise must-see viewing.

Seher Shah. Photo: Randhir Singh.