I make figurative work which explores fundamental aspects of human life: birth, fertility, procreation, temptation, pleasure, pain, and death, as a means of celebrating the duality of existence.

Manipulating a variety of forms and media, I approach making work with an almost childlike fascination for 'playing God', creating worlds and colonizing space.

Living in a society which arguably believes in nothing, but brought up in the Islamic Gulf and coming from East Africa where organised religion coincides with traditional beliefs governed by a spirit world, I am driven by the need to realise my own philosophy of being, and by the freedom of the artist to create her own illusionary world.

Inspired by Balinese shadow puppetry, the Tinga-Tinga figures of East Africa, and Montmartre's 'Chat Noir' theatre, I have created a figurative, narrative shadow language.  The shadow has been used throughout history to represent the inherent quality of man, his inside, underside, or dark side.

Thinking of Plato's cave, of Dante's divine comedy, of Goya's premise that, 'man lives falling', and influenced by the ungodly imagination of Bosch, the graphic flatness of the paintings of the Kama Sutra, Juan Munoz' ability to destabilise the viewer, and Kiki Smith's depictions of the dual liberation and repression of the female, I continue to gather experience, evolve my language and make work which is at once comedic and tragic, primordial and contemporary, playful and haunting, frivolous and vital, symptomatic of the contradictive nature of the experience of being human.

(Wall drawing installation. Adhesive vinyl, paint, clay and mixed media. 2005)