There is a famous anecdote about Henry Moore. The British sculptor was asked by a next-door farmer why he was producing huge objects; Moore retorted that it was for the same reason as his neighbour was growing flowers in his garden. Imagine, if the exchange had taken place in reverse: Henry Moore inquiring his neighbour about growing flowers, and the farmer replying — for the same reason that Moore makes sculptures. But, this would likely never have happened, because modern societies have divided roles and classified creations under certain hierarchies.

Planting flowers and tending a garden is seen as mundane, while creating a work of art is seen as extraordinary. The Iranian philosopher and author Seyyed Hossein Nasr contested this division during his talk at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore. He argued that to Islamic as well as other traditional cultures, fabricating a spoon or fork is more admirable than painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Compare the number of people who use spoons and forks and of those who visit the Vatican.

Humans have the desire to beautify their environment, things they use, places they live, even themselves. Most men shave or trim their beards and moustaches, colour or crop their hair; women put on make-up and dye their hair. Human beings also tidy up their homes, take care of their gardens and clean their surroundings. These activities require hours, resources and strength and are performed for personal satisfaction as well as to, at times, impress and delight others.

If you visit an affluent house in DHA (Karachi, Lahore or other cities of the Islamic Republic), you notice the greenery outside even before entering the inner lawn of the house and living areas. For an urbanite, to have access to a lawn – outer or inside – is thought to be crucial. It connects him/ her to a rural/ agrarian origin - a green patch amid a jungle of concrete. However, the internal and external green areas differ in many respects. Only family members, friends and a few are able to access gardens inside the gate, but the green patch between the road and the boundary wall is seen by everyone – like the clothes we wear – and pleases and delights us as well as others. In many cases, the external lawn is purely for outsiders.

What people have outside of their residences is significant, as essential as name plates fixed at the entrance – in formulating unique identities. Wardha Shabbir has gathered glimpses of these identities scattered around posh localities of Lahore to create her new paintings currently at Canvas Gallery’s booth for Art Dubai 22 in its Bawabba Section curated by Mumbai-based cultural theorist and curator, Nancy Adajania (March 9-13). Shabbir, on her early morning excursions has cajoled security guards, negotiated with gardeners and avoided owners while she documented the lavish lawns outside of rich houses.

The garden and Wardha Shabbir are not new acquaintances. She has been employing the imagery of garden as an idiom to indicate something higher, sophisticated and complex. From her first solo exhibition Many Metamorphoses at Rohtas 2, Lahore, (2012) in which she covered the floor and one wall of the gallery with grass; to her 2013 interactive installation in FLACC Belgium as part of her residency, to later years’ works with natural growth becoming the main motif to convey many messages.

In a talk at Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum 2014, Nigerian curator and art writer Okwui Enwezor described his initial idea for curating Documenta 11 (2002) as a junction with multiple trains crossing. One can view the art of Wardha Shabbir through the same vintage point. In her art, various strands from history, contemporary art, and city life merge and mix to produce an individual vocabulary: Pahari and Rajput painting, Islamic geometry and her observation of houses and their outer areas.

Shabbir has keenly observed how people curate their gardens. By planting trees, and shrubs often not belonging to the soil, they create illusion of being somewhere else. She carefully draws details of trees, stems, leaves and grass to portray a vision that is not just about greenery. Like the images of the Garden of Eden were not about illustration of botany, but a means to create a balance/ bridge between this and the other world.

Wardha Shabbir blends the garden depicted in art with everyday lawns to construct a scenario that brings together history and insight into urban settings, as well as the artist’s imagination. The most important in this chain of references is how the artist conceivesof her garden: Not an expanded area, but a sliced, spread, swirled segment. Wardha Shabbir’s gardens seem like the sides of folding structures, with all sections adding to the intended narrative. Her present body of work indicates a sense of newness in the artist’s pictorial history. Even though the imagery, by and large, is connected to her past paintings, her approach has changed a great deal. Sumptuous plants, trees, flowers and leaves not only depict nature, but also the nature of mankind.

Drawing on her experiences of reality and art of the past, Shabbir formulates surfaces, which make us believe in the garden as some kind of Ikea household product. Like those square slabs of ‘natural’ grass and soil one can purchase for domestic lawns. In Shabbir’s work, the garden becomes a rectangular shape, a zigzag, a box like article, a stripe bended several times, a folded form etc. Some of these remind one of the walls and gates of houses, particularly parts that consist of lines in different colours, which clearly communicate the pattern of outer gates. These also demonstrate how the artist takes the flatness of a miniature painting (with swirling clouds and dotted rain reminiscent of traditional visual methods)and treats it like an origami piece while she keeps on exploring the perspective of miniature painting, its pile-up masses, oblique views and three-dimensionality managed through two-dimensionality.

Wardha Shabbir’s imagery is deeply rooted in the art of miniature painting, with the motif of water, stylisation of foliage, rendering of grass, formation of clouds and the portrayal of rain – drop by drop, dot by dot. The artist also investigates parallel dimensions of space in classic miniatures - an aspect that adds the sensibility of abstract art into her recent works. Shapes of vivid and bright colours, next to a spread of dense and busy foliage of greens, turquoises, blues and other hues, turn into delightful and intriguing compositions.

With their remarkable layers of plants and sensitive chromatic relations, the surfaces of Shabbir’s paintings look like paintings within paintings. The subject is apparently gardens; but, in its essence, the paintings deal with how a single truth is entangled within other realities; especially in art or abstraction. Her new work breathes between actuality and abstraction as it moves between tradition and individuality – blurring these and other boundaries.

The exhibition ran March 9 -13    

 The author is an art critic based in Lahore