The myth of sanctification.

Myth of Sanctification began with a question I had carried for years: why does a culture sanctify some bodies and not others? Why does weight, skin colour, voice, posture or bloodline determine the dignity a person is given before they have spoken a single word?

The residency in Nepal became a chance to test that question in another context. I used illustration as inquiry: a slow, layered way to interrogate the hierarchies that privilege certain bodies while marginalising others, and to expose the cultural and political mechanisms that sustain those divisions.

I treated drawing as a research method. Each line was a way of staying with a question longer than conversation alone would allow: a way to hold complexity without resolving it too quickly.

Working alongside three Taiwanese and Nepali artists, I compared the body politics I had grown up with in Pakistan against what was named, normalised, or quietly enforced in Nepal. The vocabularies were different. The underlying architecture of acceptability was the same.

Before the workshop, I sat with the symbols I kept returning to: flowers, bodies, letters, chairs. Each one carried a contradiction worth pulling on.

The workshop was hosted with a local community of women and artists. We sewed, talked, drew, and named the messages we had absorbed about our bodies, across generations, geographies and languages. The room held both laughter and long silences.

The conversations clustered into four organising themes. Each became one plate in the final body of work.

1. I.Blood

   What the body offers, and what it is shamed for offering. Menstruation, bloodline, caste, inheritance: the politics of what flows through us.

2. II.Flesh

   Weight as a moral category. Skin colour as social currency. How much of a body is allowed before it becomes a problem to be solved.

3. III.Voice

   Who is taught to speak softly, and why. The volume permitted to different bodies in the same room.

4. IV.Space

   The physical room a body is allowed to take up: on a bus, in a classroom, at a dinner table, in a public square.

The first plate to emerge was the spine and ribcage entangled with flowers: a body that holds beauty and weight in the same gesture. From here the visual language of the series was set: linework, watercolour stain, and bilingual typography.

1. 01

   Arriving with a question

   I came into the residency carrying a question shaped by growing up in Pakistan: why do some bodies feel permitted, and others apologetic? I wanted to test whether that question travelled: whether women in Nepal recognised the same hierarchies in different forms.

2. 02

   Workshop with the local community

   Together with three Taiwanese and Nepali artists, I held a community workshop in Kathmandu. Sitting on the floor, we mapped the messages we had absorbed about weight, skin, voice and space, using drawing, conversation and shared silence as research tools.

3. 03

   Reading across two cultures

   The vocabularies differed; the architecture of bias did not. Fairness creams, marriageability, posture, modesty, bloodline. The same hierarchies showed up wearing different clothes across Pakistani and Nepali contexts.

4. 04

   From conversation to illustration

   I distilled the workshop into four organising themes: blood, flesh, voice, space, and began translating them into visual studies. Anatomy, flora, Urdu and Devanagari script, watercolour stains, and protest typography were layered as overlapping evidence.

5. 05

   Blending traditional and digital

   Watercolour and ink carried the body and the bleed. Photoshop and Illustrator carried the typography and the political grammar. The blend was deliberate: neither folk nor fully contemporary, but the seam where both meet.

The final body of work reads together as one argument, and apart as six individual questions. Watercolour, ink, anatomy, flora, and bilingual typography stacked as overlapping evidence.

Myth of Sanctification was exhibited as a set of framed plates blending watercolour, ink, Urdu and Devanagari typography, and digital composition. The work refuses to settle into either folk craft or contemporary critique. It sits at the seam where both meet, which is where the question itself lives.

The work did not end with the exhibition. I also went on to participate in a movement to destigmatise periods, taking the conversation from the gallery wall into the street, from private shame into public dialogue.

The body is not a neutral surface. It is the first political document we carry, and the one we are least allowed to read aloud.