As a migrant from Afghanistan, Palwasha Qazi’s work draws from the experience of newness that comes from relocating to a new country,  learning a new language, and encountering newness in every aspect of life.  Combining the Islamic calligraphic tradition with the most quintessential Canadian art format, the painted landscape, Qazi’s work questions the relationship between land, language and memory.

Her paintings are metaphors and act as complex archives of memory and experience. They are about home and the relationship to land and the past. While memories slip away from the mind with age these works point to the body as a rich archive of experiences and sensations.  Painting in expressionist brushwork transfers this embodied history into an archive of paint, reconstituting a history from within, retracing movement while exploring new relationships. The process of layering, playing with transparency, building up colours and erasing them translates this complex experience into paint, mirroring the process of reflection and memory, and calling the past from beneath the present.