Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2022, Noorain Inam has honed her imagination and skill by combining experimentation with almost a decade of training in miniature painting in Karachi, Pakistan and London, England. Her second solo exhibition, Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind comes to audiences at the new location of Indigo+Madder in London a year after her first.

With a body of work created across six months of an artist residency at the Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, in Cornwall, the exhibition is a display of reflections about darkness, night, fear, and grief as they relate to bodies of water. Inam derives inspiration from deeply personal experiences and feminist aesthetics of horror imbued in film and literature. She explores this fascination further with the body of work in the exhibition depicting horror and mystery in terms of vulnerability in domestic, intimate spaces such as a bedroom and living room, as well as exterior spaces such as the sea. The meanings of interior and exterior spaces are personal to Inam and go beyond their walls to reveal larger existential questions she asks of herself, related to love, death, and madness. The works include intricate mystical scenes composed of light blue clear skies filled with birds fading into dark stormy skies over a fire-filled earth, with a herd of horses with saddles on their backs following each other in a line. There are also smaller evocative paintings of sunsets, where the sky merges with the sea. In this conversation with STIR, Inam talks about how the presence of the sea, waves, and their innate darkness enhanced her spontaneity as well as reflection which have been translated into the works on display.

Pramodha Weerasekera: What does painting mean to you? How has your relationship with it evolved over the years?

Noorain Inam: I had the technical skills of a miniaturist because I trained since I was 15, but I used to think of myself as a painter and not an artist. An artist relies on their imagination and their experiences to inform their work as opposed to someone else's ideas. During my time at the Slade and the past year spent in residencies, I wanted to learn as much as I could and develop myself as an artist. After all, my life experiences do inform my work. We have these chairs made of cane at home in Karachi. My teacher used to make me draw and paint the same chair every day for six months. She would damage it every single day so I would look closely and observe the changes. I tell everyone that it was like Karate Kid – by cleaning, the kid was learning how to fight. I learned to respect the medium and discipline. I also do not use references from external sources or sketches before I paint on canvas. All my paintings are directly made on the canvas, rather instinctually. There is no planning or sketching involved. I do not think I have a very loud personality, but my paintings are loud. I was not able to ever connect the two before. Now, I finally feel that the loudness comes from within me.

Pramodha: Your paintings depict domestic, intimate spaces in imagined, almost magical and mythical stories, whether in comfort, disarray, or perfection. What does the feeling of home mean to you? Do the beds, interiors and your idea of a home have a connection?

Noorain: They do. That is what intimacy means to me. When I first moved to London I saw works by Mark Rothko, Mohammed Sami, and Matthew Krishanu. How they engage with backgrounds in the canvases of their paintings was interesting to me. I also like horror. I grew up reading Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. Growing up in Pakistan, a lot of our television networks were distributed by US companies, like HBO and Star Movies. I watched The Exorcist with my father when I was way too young. I remember its staircase scenes. My interior spaces are often nods to Alfred Hitchcock: crows [The Birds] and Vertigo. These were the films that we grew up watching. It has informed a lot of my imagination. I have only recently discovered what low-budget South Asian horror films look like. It is the best awful thing I have ever seen. Painting has helped me tap into that world of horror in my own way. I have had a lot of conversations about Surrealism with artists. I do not mind the title or label. But I do think that Surrealism is a European movement because it essentially was a counterculture to an economic industrial revolution. I ask myself what counterculture is to mysticism and Sufism, for example, in Southeast Asia and South Asia.

Amparo Dávila, a Mexican writer, says that the three greatest mysteries of life are love, death and madness. My favourite story by her is in Musica concreta, and it is about a woman who believes she is being stalked by a toad. It shows women’s thoughts and emotions related to domestic spaces which are seemingly normal. Konstantin Korovin, a Russian painter has a painting called Interior, which shows a living room. I find it unsettling because it is just too perfect, not real. That is the fascinating part about fear and uncertainty; it can creep up on you in the most seemingly normal circumstances.

Beds, especially for me, are the departure point of reality. It is where the unconscious mind begins. That is when you begin to dream. In some religions, there is a belief that sleep is the closest you are to dying. I like Philip Guston's desire to be, to feel he was every object he saw. It is the same with painting – you must feel it. I looked at a lot of beds in art, including those in Louise Bourgeois’ drawings. Many artists have explored the subject, and I wanted to make it personal for me. The way that I would experience it as someone in their twenties is different to how Guston would approach it with all the knowledge in his arsenal.

Pramodha: I love your approach to developing your idea of home in a geographical space that is alien to you. You created the body of work for Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind at a home away from both Karachi and London, the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, near the sea in Cornwall. How has this experience translated into this new body of work?

Noorain: First, this is probably the most intimate body of work that I have done. I do not have a sentimental attachment to workspaces. I have that for people – a room is just four walls unless occupied by a person. Five of the past nine months, I spent in Cornwall by myself. My studio overlooked the ocean, and I would go out on walks to watch the sunset. I never got used to that incredible sight. There is something liberating about walking by yourself on the beach. A lot of women do not get to enjoy that luxury.

My grandmother and I used to go on walks by the beach in the Arabian Sea in Karachi. She had Alzheimer’s, and I made a promise to her that I would take her one last time. She passed away before I could. Once, when I was sitting by the sea in Cornwall, I just burst into tears. I felt that feeling of someone being there with me. I immediately went to the studio to paint. There is one delicate painting about my grandmother. Matthew Krishanu came to my show last year and said that sometimes small gestures in a painting can have a really big impact. I thought about it for months. There are some paintings in the new show with intricate borders and a different kind of fire study, windows foreshadowing the next. Then there are some really quiet paintings, which are also very close to me.

Cornwall helped me develop an uninhibited process. I used the time to imagine that no one would see these paintings. I did them for myself. I worked consistently for 90 days straight in the studio. I was exhausted and had a fever for four days. It was a lot of hard work coupled with opportunities to engage with the work of many like-minded creatives, musicians, artists, and vice versa. I never want to stop learning from the community around me.

Pramodha: I am noticing that you have a strong relationship with the night and darkness. Your 2023 solo exhibition was titled A dream that visited every night and the upcoming solo tells us to Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind. What is this relationship like?

Noorain: I read this quote somewhere – “love is a window, and horror is a mirror”. Fear will show you everything that you are scared of and force you to face things you do not like about yourself. But love is a window into someone else's life. I never paint about love, because that is someone else's world. I always paint about fear, because that is the mirror to myself. Fear has a lot to do with darkness in my interpretation of it.

Pramodha: What are you most excited for audiences to experience during the exhibition at the new space of Indigo+Madder in London?

Noorain: I made a conscious decision right after my solo show last year to not do a lot of shows. I wanted to walk away, disappear, and work extensively on one body of work. I was fortunate to be able to get two back-to-back residencies to do that. I am excited for people to see what an artist can come up with when they disappear for a year. What can isolation do to a body of work or someone's headspace? A lot can happen within a year or two. It is the gift of time.

Pramodha: Have you experimented with other mediums in this exhibition? 

Noorain: It is a very ambitious body of work for me. I have made 37 objects, sculptures, and paintings using watercolours. There is an installation, too. I went a bit nuts with this show. I am a little nervous as well, of course. I learned to have a lot of compassion for my own and others’ experiences while living in London. It is a space where you can sit and have an open, vulnerable conversation with someone you barely know. I hope these works stand out not just as experiments with medium but also as intimate conversations with art enthusiasts.

Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind is on view at Indigo+Madder’s new location at 14 Great Turnstile in London from June 22 to July 21, 2024.