With a sensitive and empathetic eye, Saad Qureshi explores the essence of what it is to be human. Seeking out people of all faiths and none, he gathers their stories and weaves them together like silken threads, rendering memories and imaginings into otherworldly sculptural “mindscapes” that give a spatial presence to the narratives that help to make sense of life. His enduring fascination with ideas of paradise may have taken root during his upbringing in a religious household, but he has developed his thinking in truly unique, expansive ways.
From early large-scale projects such as Places For Nova (2017) and Congregation (2014) to the towering, monumental pieces shown in “Something About Paradise” (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2020) and recent public commissions such as Gift and Convocation (both 2023), Qureshi has never wavered. “A Handful of Paradise” at I DE V / l’étrangère—one of two current exhibitions in London showcasing his work—offers a more intimately scaled vision, its exquisitely crafted works once again delving into human hearts and minds with curiosity, warmth, and consideration. In an often-polarized society, Qureshi’s wish is for his work to generate dialogue and unity. He aims to forge bridges between people, between ideas, between what is and what could be. It’s poetry in three dimensions.
Beth Williamson: You studied painting at art school. How did the shift to sculpture come about?
Saad Qureshi: I did a BTec in fine art at Bradford College of Art, which was a very broad fine art course. I had the freedom to experiment and work out what it was that I really wanted to do. I was always more interested in painting because I was intrigued that, as a painter, you’re able to make an illusion of another space. Then I went to Oxford Brookes University, another very broad fine art course, and carried on painting. But when I went to the Slade to study for an MFA, I fell out of love with it. I believe that as an artist, the medium picks you—it’s like a calling. It’s a very spiritual process, and painting had become restricting. At the Slade, the conversations were about process and materiality, color and surface, space. I had real-life issues to address—my cultural identity, making sense of my surroundings as a person of color growing up in the U.K. and how to bridge those gaps. Those were the things that I was interested in, what I wanted to address in my work, and I didn’t think that was appreciated at the Slade. I was trying to rebel against the institution. At one point, instead of painting on the main surface, I drew on the edge of the canvas, and I displayed it like a shelf. I still feel that was a turning point in my practice, when I suddenly realized that I no longer needed to be restricted to the wall. I could just come out into space and be a sculptor.
BW: A lot of your work is about collecting stories from people and weaving them together, creating a sculpture as “mindscape,” to use your term. Can you talk about that process? What is behind these ideas, and how do you go about forming a sculpture out of them?
SQ: I was born in Pakistan, and moving to England as a child had a huge impact on my life. I realized that my experience was not exclusive, in fact, it’s very universal. There are millions of people who can resonate with feeling displaced, as if you don’t belong, who are simply trying to make sense of their existence in the surroundings in which they find themselves, then bridging the gap between themselves and other people. That’s essentially what I do through my work. Since I acknowledge that this is a universal experience, I want to make the work as inclusive as possible, so I invite people to contribute their stories. These stories vary from project to project. For example, when I did my first public commission in London, Places For Nova, I invited the general public to donate memories of landscapes that they no longer had access to. I asked for verbal stories only, no images. People described fragments of landscapes, which were then within my remit to reimagine and manifest into a miniature, sculptural world.
I call them mindscapes because they are coming out of memories and stories of real places, but what you are looking at is neither real nor totally imagined. To borrow a religious term, it is like resurrecting a particular moment in someone else’s life. It’s a great privilege to offer an opportunity to an individual to look back and revisit a certain time. I also think about the elasticity of time and space and scale. I deliberately try not to follow the rules of scale. It all fits in very nicely because the stories that I’ve collected have been knitted together into these mindscapes. For it to work, everything needs to be very comfortable, well juxtaposed.
BW: Convocation, your commission for Raffles OWO in London, is a striking work. What is the story behind it? What do you hope people take from it?
SQ: Convocation was a prize commission. When I won, they gave me a very broad brief. The work needed to have two things: first, it needed to respond to modern Britain; and second, it needed to reflect the grandiosity of the Old War Office buildings. I was a good fit because I live across cultures. Growing up, I thought that was the biggest curse I could have, because it was so confusing, but as an adult, I feel like it is the best blessing that I could have. What a privilege to have access to all different aspects of the story. I think that the U.K., London in particular, sets a good example of a multicultural society that’s working. And I think that religion and culture, even though they are completely different entities, are inseparable—one is informed by the other. For Convocation, I decided to look at elements of religious architecture, particularly historical religious architecture, then knit them together into a sculpture that completely mixes different styles and yet works in unity. I’m looking at architectural cues, what I call “visual abbreviations.” What I mean by that is that when you look at one element, you immediately know where and when you are. Of all the human interventions in this world, architecture is the only one that offers the opportunity for you to be so specific about your time and location.
The other thing that I find intriguing about religious architecture is how we deliberately make it grandiose. This is important; it serves the imagination of the believer. There’s a purpose to the grandiosity, and that’s what my work offers in its attention to detail. For me, it’s important that these works are handmade and seen as handwritten letters from me to the world. I’m aware that the work has a religious, social, and maybe, in places, political awareness underpinning it. But I’m not making any comments. I’m not making any statements. I’m trying to create experiences. That’s what the work is about—making an experience for the viewer—and that is what I want people to get from the work.
BW: Gift, another important commission, is installed in the lobby of the renal unit of the Royal London Hospital. You deal with memory in this work, creating a physical and emotional landscape in an object. How do you negotiate the emotional terrain in the stories you encounter through making?
SQ: When you’re doing a project like this, sensitivity and empathy are incredibly important. Gift is an organ donation memorial and that is a subject, and a concept, that I take very seriously. It ties in with my practice as a whole, where I am looking at bridging gaps and telling human stories. I invited people from the entire organ donation network—recipients, donors, families, doctors, nurses—to share stories. There were a lot of incredibly emotional moments. Organ donation is something that needs to be looked at in a positive light because it’s a genuine gift of life. I wanted to make it a celebration, but I also wanted to keep it monochrome at the same time. The use of red brick dust was key. We know bricks as a building material, but with the simple act of grinding them into dust again it immediately places you in an otherworldly context, like Alice in Wonderland, where you can navigate your way through these mindscapes.
BW: “Of Paradise and Other Places,” currently on view at HS Projects in London, features three components. There is a monumental work from “Something About Paradise,” your exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which presents a mindscape with diverse landscapes, architecture styles, and scales. Then, there are the ornate and hand-cut Gates of Paradise II–VII and the bird Abaabil (2022). Could you explain the connections across these different elements and your choice of a monochrome gray palette?
SQ: The red palette came first; the gray palette only emerged when I was working on the show for YSP. Those works came out of my interest in the concept of paradise. I was born into a very religious household, where the seven heavens of the Islamic world formed the backdrop of my upbringing. As I grew up, moved away from home, and expanded my social circle, I met people of other religions and no religion, and they all had their own concept of paradise. Of course, some were talking about a very utopian world, an earthly paradise, rather than a heavenly paradise. When the opportunity came up to make a show for the chapel at YSP, it was a perfect chance for me to realize this project. I traveled across the country, visiting a lot of religious and non-religious institutions, and talked to as many people as possible, asking for their concepts of paradise.
These verbalized stories were reimagined into mindscapes, which have their own visual language. I wanted to create a more dreamlike, fantastical, magical mindscape. I initially painted everything white, but it became too much of a dreamscape. Then I played with tons of gray, which is a non-color in the sense that it’s as it is before the colors arrive. It’s a very pure palette. I wanted the work to be in a slightly different reality, and hence it’s important that it is seen in monochrome gray. It’s a bit like looking at an old photo. The works first shown in “Something About Paradise,” including Gates of Paradise, are in that palette for those reasons. It was interesting how people kept talking about some form of a threshold to enter paradise; it was a cliché that kept coming up in my conversations. Instead of making something very physical, I wanted to place it in a shadowy world, as if you were looking at a shadow of the gate rather than the gate itself. The bird, Abaabil, is from another, larger project called Congregation—a whole field of imagined birds that initially came out of the Quranic story of the abaabil. They were made very quickly and hold a lot of energy.
BW: For “A Handful of Paradise,” you’ve made new works that pick up on ideas of paradise again, this time explored through multiple small mindscapes—memories and objects housed in monochrome drawers. How did that come about?
SQ: It’s been quite a while since I’ve been so excited about a project. I made the first drawer-based works in 2012, which was the first time that I tapped into the concept of a mindscape. These handmade objects were all made using my own memories and placed in little domestic drawers. Over the last 12 years, I’ve gained a lot of experience not only making, but also showing work and receiving feedback, and that got me excited about revisiting an idea for the first time. I’ve made three sculptures in different, reclaimed drawers. This time, they host not my stories, but other stories that I’ve collected. I’m also showing Airship I (2019) and several large and small Tanabanas, as well as a small bronze sculpture called Sweet Bird of Paradise (2020).
BW: It strikes me that, in your Tanabana paper tapestries, you are weaving in the same way that you weave stories in your sculptural work. They are connected to your personal history, aren’t they?
SQ: Textiles are at the heart of my family history. My grandfather was a tailor making uniforms for the British army. My mother is an incredibly talented needleworker, tailor, and weaver. My family sees textiles, generally, as a sacred medium. Fabric is the first and the last material that we come into contact with as human beings, at birth and death. My mother didn’t have a formal education, but she was given textile skills, including crocheting, knitting, weaving, and tailoring. Initially she resented this, but over the years as she navigated through life, she began to talk about how it’s become her identity, a mechanism of survival. There is a lot of her work in the house, and I wanted to work with that side of my family history. Covid lockdown gave me an opportunity to focus on this aspect of my personal history. I gathered her work together and photographed it. I then cut the photographs into very small strips and rewove them, so my mother was then teaching me how to weave. I was using pattern as a material to make new patterns. It’s another form of storytelling in which I am re-telling existing stories and keeping my mother involved in the process.
BW: What’s paradise like for you?
SQ: That’s a very difficult question because it changes and evolves. Right now, in light of recent events around the world, I’d like to see religious institutions across the board becoming multifaith institutions. There would be one building—beautiful, entirely ornate, grandiose—and on Sundays, there would be church services in that building, on Fridays Islamic prayer, and so on, in unity. I’m a very optimistic person, but over the last year or so, I’ve been becoming increasingly sad. Religion is a very beautiful thing—it just needs to not be exploited, and if we can come to such an arrangement, that, for me, would be paradise. I’m not talking about a heavenly paradise. My version of paradise is most definitely an earthly paradise. Let’s make it here, right now. Let’s not wait until we die.
Saad Qureshi’s “Of Paradise and Other Places” is on view at HS Projects, 5 Howick Place in London, through December 13, 2024. “A Handful of Paradise” is on view at I DE V/ l’étrangère, also in London, through December 14.
