Alchemy of Becoming embraces a practice of “always becoming”. Of transformation, evolution, renewal. As the earth seeks continually to heal itself, absorbing the trauma of the land and its inhabitants, regenerating from scars of ongoing destruction. Landscapes of displacement and erasure transmute into Landscapes of Imagining, hope embedded in transformation. Fragments of earlier works collage with new creations. Threatened glaciers transmute into soaring birds, landscapes into collaged abstractions, enshrined in gold. Women’s embroidered caps mark sites of disappearance while reclaiming them, their presence persisting through their craft placed in the landscape where communities were displaced.

My practice centers displacement and belonging, our relationship with land, pattern, and transformation. Working with displaced materials, threatened landscapes, and patterns both natural and human-made, I reveal the sacred geometries embedded within them. At the core of this work is transformation. Alchemy, from the Arabic word al-kimiya, refers to the transformation of base metals into gold, but also the purification of self through that process. My process follows alchemical stages: burning, cutting, dissolving, reassembling, gilding. The same material reforms into new configurations, the making as transformative personally as it is materially. The work is dynamic, evolving into new stages in each space. This is the alchemy of becoming: transformation as ongoing practice, where hope lives, the same material holding futures not yet imagined.

In Urdu, we use the same word—kul (کل)—to mean both yesterday and tomorrow. Past and future coalesce, opening the possibility of rebuilding new worlds from the wreckage of the old. In my work, gold leaf embraces the alchemist’s quest: making the ordinary sacred. Fusing yesterday and tomorrow in an unforeseen futurity of hope.