he intent in Ayesha Zulfiqar’sart eludes thecasual viewer. Works from her last exhibition at Khaas Contemporary, Islamabad, convey an emptiness, yet these do not lack thing-ness, imagery and meaning. Zulfiqar was trained as a sculptor at the National College of Arts, Lahore. In the solo show, held in October this year, she appeared to be exploring and expanding the possibilities of this discipline.

A major difference between the craft of painting and sculpture, is that a painter begins their process by drawing an elementary sketch on a blank surface. It is gradually filled with layers of paint that can be thick and heavy, or mixed with found things such as torn newspapers, broken objects, discarded items, stuff toys, taxidermied animalsetc. Whatever the choice of material or visuals, artists using a flat surface by and large start with empty space and place marks, daubs, lines, textures to create an illusion of a living being; arrangements of domestic articles; a combination of trees, fields, vegetation, water, mountain, sky, clouds; or areas of colours that do not signify a familiar optical information.

Sculptors, on the other hand, employ a different process. If using the traditional additive method, a creative individual shapes the form in clay. Then a mould is made to produce the final cast, which resembles the initial clay version, but is executed in some other, more durable or permanent material such as the plaster of Paris, bronze, brass, etc. One visiting a sculptor’s studiooften wonders about the fate and future of these moulds, abandoned after producing a number of editions. What is the use, significance and value of these vacant pieces that contain the residue of actual artworks, but look like their twin ghosts.

A number of sculptors do get fascinated with the presence of emptiness. Rachel Whiteread, the British artist, materialises the inner atmosphere of an object, a structure. “Through casting, she frees her subject matter – from beds, tables and boxes to water towers and entire houses – from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory.”

Ayesha Zulfiqar has carved another path for her aesthetic journey. Instead of the inner fruit, it is the gap between inside and outside that intrigues her, to the extent that she created an installation comprising the corners of a room at her solo exhibition. Drawn in a clinical manner, these edges, where two or three surfaces – walls and floor, or walls and ceiling – meet, become the point of departure for her. She maps them, but takes only a tiny bit, and casts them in brass (a total of 49 pieces in her installation Cornerscape 2024), and puts them in a grid format in the middle of a squarish space. Zulfiqar explains that by extracting “…these corners from their original locations, the collection aims to encapsulate the essence of the site in a tangible form, serving as a portable memoir with significant standalone value.” Hence pulling together far ends of a built space, Ayesha Zulfiqarcreate a new geometric relationship out of nothingness.

The aesthetics of absence continue in her other work, like the Meeting Point, 2024, the shell-like form in porcelain. This small sculpture (8 x 8 x 8 inches) is a recollection of high walls and extended floor. An essential memory and a pivotal point, it is the anvil that provides huge structures their stability and firmness. She delineates internal spaces in small objects, mostly simplified and geometric, drawing a line around them – in ceramic, terracotta. What a viewer get to see is a glimpse of the outline (displayed in a sequence on the gallery wall) of things that have disappeared. Vanished, died or being deleted.

Ayesha Zulfiqar reverses her process in a set of five two-dimensional objects, Form Within ll, Form Within lll, Form Within lV, Form Within V and Form Within VI (serigraph on wood). She picks a cubit or a boxand slices its inner volume from a range of angles. What emerges out of this operation is the internal skin of a hard, solid, symmetrical object. About her preference for this form, Zulfiqarsays, “For me, space always feels like a white cube, boundless yet contained. When I think of form, the first shape that comes to mind is always a cube.”

On the surface, her recent work comes across as being abstract, minimal and geometric. However, there can be another channel to approach the work – far from the formal lens. Ayesha’s emphasis on interiors and emptiness can be stretched to the conventional role of women required in a male dominated society. Being inside, hidden, almost invisible, is a position demanded by others. In certaincircumstances this is assumed by females themselves. The significant presence of empty moulds may be understood as a metaphor for gender; a female, a mother who brings out a new body from the dark chambers of her flesh.

The reviewer is an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.