“We have forsaken nature and we’re a bunch of thieves,” my mom often mutters with venom, cycling through news channels over breakfast. To ease her mind from the burning world, she puts on a three-hour YouTube video of the Swiss Alps – lakes, lush trees, white-nibbed peaks turning orange at sunset. “Hamara Pakistan aisa ban sakta hai agar hum roadein dhang ki banayein,” she sighs, and remembers the burning world again.
I, like many others, grew up on that contradiction: the bus accidents, the floods, and the ever-clean Alps, people calling Skardu and Hunza the “Switzerland” of Pakistan. I also grew up on the CW show Supernatural, which I first watched with my mom when I was nine – Sam and Dean road-tripping across America, fighting poltergeists and skinwalkers. It introduced me to the Windigo, an Algonquian creature whose lore I’d search on YouTube as a teen until I couldn’t sleep. I thanked God I never had a supernatural encounter of my own – until my mom flicked my ear on a buggy ride back from Saif-ul-Malook when I was seventeen and told me, gravely, that a jinn from the lake got “stuck” to me.
What I didn’t catch, for years, was my inherited fetishized view of “up north” Pakistan that city kids absorb: the North as a monolith of scenery, clean air, bad roads and bathrooms. Sarah Ahmad’s work is what provoked this conversation within me, about how myopic that gaze had been. I first saw ‘The American Dream,’ her tent of marigolds, and was moved by how she responded to a trauma that wasn’t hers but that she felt, standing on grief- and blood-strewn ground. Later, ‘Quilting Patterns of Identity’ taught me more about the subjugation of Gilgit-Baltistan – and, through it, of Kashmir, of Native American tribes sequestered to Oklahoma, of Black communities worldwide.
Concurrently I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which centers Indigenous knowledge as a scientific methodology marked by empathy and groundedness. Kimmerer eloquently explains: “The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a Windigo economy.”
Ahmad’s treatments of photography, installation and assemblage poke and prod at precisely this inquiry, and bring me back to the sky, the ground, the sweating sea I live beside, pushed further away each year by coastal development.
Sarah Ahmad was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and, since 2024, has lived and worked between New York, Santa Fe, Tulsa, and Lahore. She earned a BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore, an MA in Education from Union University, and an MFA from Memphis College of Art in Tennessee.
EMAN FARHAN: Are there specific moments when you’ve felt the grief of the land most deeply, in Pakistan, in America, or elsewhere? What did those moments look like, and how did they sit in your body?
SARAH AHMAD: I feel the land’s power of renewal even where it has absorbed trauma and grief, and its regenerative force runs through me as both a spiritual and a bodily experience. But the destruction of land also leaves its mark on me.
I live and work in Tulsa, on the site of the 1921 Race Massacre, where a white mob destroyed Greenwood’s Black Wall Street, one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country. Here, the grief of the land wove itself through my body, until it felt like an inseparable part of me. When I was invited to create a work for the centennial, I was pulled, again and again, to the forest rather than to Greenwood itself. Hiking through Oxley Nature Center, I felt the earth absorb my anxieties and pain. I felt myself coming alive again, from the shadow of a person, fragmented inside, into someone whole. Embodied and belonging.
There, I installed ‘The American Dream’: a tent replicating the ones made by families who became homeless due to the Massacre. It was adorned with marigolds that recalled the fiery bombs that destroyed their neighborhood. Visitors reached it through forest-bathing walks, a sanctuary for healing generational pain. Standing inside the tent, I felt engulfed by a trauma that consumed me from the inside out, yet the marigolds gave me hope and a sense of solidarity with the community of my adopted home. Only after the work was installed did I learn what the land already knew: Survivors of the massacre had fled to these same woods and taken shelter there. Members of the community told me their ancestors had called through me for the work to happen here.
But it was at Attabad Lake, in Hunza, that I felt the land’s grief most deeply. Where the water ends, the tops of submerged houses rise from the sand and dead trees rise from the lake: the remains of villages buried by a landslide. Snow-capped peaks tower around them, while the families who lived there remain far from the land that once sustained them. Standing among those rooftops, I felt a panic and a pain I still cannot fully put into words, as if my own body were buried beneath a weight I could not carry. Held between such beauty and such loss, I felt disconnected from my own body. It left me feeling broken.
EF: You’ve probably been asked this before, and I imagine you’ve had to reckon with it. What becomes possible in your work from outside Pakistan that wouldn’t be possible if you were making it from within? Is there a dissonance between the two positions, and if so, how does it surface in the work?
SA: There is a dissonance, but it has become a lens. I left Pakistan for the American South in my twenties, and as an immigrant I am not rooted in any one place. I find belonging in landscapes, in nature, in the places I inhabit. In the US, I am often a visitor, and in Gilgit-Baltistan, a visitor too. That position brings a unique perspective. Moving between places lets me find the parallels between them. My own experience of displacement becomes the thread that connects these histories.
The most important thing is this lens through which I can see the same patterns of displacement, land extraction, climate catastrophe and colonial violence repeating across geographies. In ‘Unearthing Stories From the Core,’ I found an unexpected alignment between rural America and Pakistan: contested territories, with landscapes of great beauty and land that bears deep trauma.
Oklahoma is the end point of the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Native Nations from their homelands. Yet the territory promised to them was later taken again and opened to white settlers. The struggle of Native people for sovereignty finds a parallel in Gilgit-Baltistan, whose people still struggle for recognition and representation in Pakistan’s national assembly. The displacement of Native people echoes in the displacement of the people of Attabad. Though theirs came from a landslide, a climate disaster, I look at displacement as a broader experience: the loss of home, land and the sustenance it gave. Extraction follows the same pattern. Oil wealth on Native land in Oklahoma led to the murder of Native people for their mineral rights, and uranium mining in New Mexico destroyed landscapes sacred to Native people. In Balochistan, minerals are mined and carried away while the local population sees little benefit.
Each body of work is a process of becoming
Living outside Pakistan has also meant negotiating identity between cultures. In ‘Quilting Patterns of Identity,’ I fused Pakistani quilt patterns with North American quilt designs, creating a dialogue between women from different cultures and time periods. Each immigrant carries parts of their native culture with parts of the new one. For me, the hybrid offered the lens that shaped ‘The American Dream.’ I saw Greenwood within a global history of violence against Black and brown people. Images of Tulsa in ashes reminded me of the US drone strikes that killed civilians in Pakistan. The tent became a symbol of state-sponsored violence around the world, and in 2025 it travelled to Lahore as ‘The American Dream II.’
EF: Is there a sensory memory from Pakistan that your body holds and that your work keeps returning to?
SA: The sensory memory my body holds from Pakistan is the richness of its visual culture. Its color, pattern, its vibrant palette. I grew up surrounded by them: quilts and other textiles, like embroidery from across different regions; Islamic patterns carved into architectural screens; marigolds strung into garlands for weddings, and laid as offerings at shrines. My work keeps returning to them. Marigolds cover the tent of ‘The American Dream.’ Quilt designs from Pakistan shape ‘Quilting Patterns of Identity,’ and embroidered Hunza caps mark the land in ‘Acts of Disappearance.’
Above all, I return to pattern itself, to repetition as a way of making. Whether I am collaging photographs into birds or assembling hundreds of laser-cut pieces of Islamic geometric pattern into ‘Cosmic Veils,’ an installation that scatters colored light across a room, I build one repeated piece at a time, until the parts become a whole.
EF: The birds in your Parwaz series are built from photographs of the Passu Glacier in Gilgit-Baltistan. Do you know about Gang Khswa, the glacier marriage ritual, where a male glacier and a female glacier are joined in an ice pit with gifts and songs to birth new ice? As someone who grew up in Lahore, and asking as a Karachiite, do you think those of us from Pakistan’s plains and cities carry a fetishized view of “the North” as something separate from the very land we walk and drive on? Does that question live anywhere in your work?
SA: I didn’t know about Gang Khswa until your question, and I’m grateful to learn of it. The idea of glaciers as male and female beings, joined to birth new ice, is very close to how the people I met spoke of their land: as an extension of themselves, the source of their lives and livelihoods, and a spiritual connection.
And yes, the question does live in my work. I think those of us from Pakistan’s plains and cities do carry a fetishized view of the North, and I include my own gaze in that. It is spoken of as a holiday destination of magnificent beauty, a view to escape to.
But I didn’t want my work to rest on a gaze fixed on the landscape without its inhabitants, who have been the guardians of this land. The people displaced by the Attabad landslide, who lived in tents for eight years before a colony was built for them near Gilgit, far from their ancestral home. Meanwhile, Attabad Lake, formed by the same landslide that submerged their villages, has become a prime tourist destination lined with resorts.
On my first visit to Gilgit-Baltistan, I created ‘Acts of Disappearance,’ in which women’s embroidered caps mark sites of disappearance. The work was made with local participation, and I tried to honor the experiences of displaced communities. I visited people’s homes and villages, working with the complaints officer of the Human Rights Commission in Gilgit-Baltistan. I saw the Passu Glacier on a hike with a local activist. Residents shared how the glaciers fast-melting continue to burst causing catastrophic floods and landslides. This environmental collapse is glossed over by visitors who come for the beauty.
Activists described a pattern of extraction in which prime, resource-rich land is confiscated from local people while the wealth flows elsewhere. I think it’s significant that these glaciers feed the Indus, the river that waters the plains and cities we call home. The North is not a discrete, isolated elsewhere; it is upstream. We are connected by the same water.
The birds in Parwaz are collaged from my own photographs of a single visit to the Passu Glacier; their ascent suggests migration and belonging. In Gang Khswa, pieces of two living glaciers are grafted to birth new ice. In Parwaz, fragments of a glacier are collaged into birds in flight. Both treat the glacier as something alive, capable of becoming a new whole.
EF: What is your first memory of the earth? And what is your first memory as an artist?
SA: My first memory of the earth is the front lawn of my childhood home, where we played. Yellow chrysanthemums in flowerpots lined the yard. I didn’t think of them when I made ‘The American Dream,’ my installation marking the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, but looking back, I see them in its yellow and orange marigolds.
My first memory as an artist is building with Stickle Bricks, pulling the pieces apart and rebuilding them into new structures. I still work this way. My Jaali installations are built from the same fragments of screens carved in Islamic geometric patterns, reassembled into a new configuration for each site. This process carries across my installations, which are ephemeral, site-responsive and constantly evolving, taken apart and rebuilt each time.
EF: How do you think about the body as a kind of landscape, especially the feminine body?
SA: For me, the body is first an inner landscape, a psychic landscape. Trauma and displacement fragment us from within, and I see that psychic fragmentation reflected in the broken, uprooted forms of nature: fallen trees, ruptured from life’s many storms. I respond to them because I recognize myself in them. For me, the inner landscape that seeks healing, finds it in the exterior landscapes I walk through and inhabit.
I explored this connection directly in my autobiographical series Bol. I made it during a period of transition in my life, when the woods became my refuge and a place of healing. Its title comes from Faiz’s poem, Speak, for your lips are free. I photographed women covered in lace chadars, wrapped around fallen trees in the woods.
The theme of veiling was also centered in this work. The chadars symbolize cultural identity; they are full of contradictions. Beautiful, colorful and protective, yet they confine, hiding the woman’s full identity. In some images she struggles to break free; in others she seems to have surrendered. Bol is about a woman’s multiple, veiled, paradoxical identities, and her search for self-knowledge and a voice. The veil returns in ‘Cosmic Veils,’ inspired by the Veil Nebula. A veil alternately reveals and conceals; shelters and isolates. Because the Veil Nebula was created in the aftermath of a massive star exploding, the ‘veils’ drifting in space became a metaphor for resurrection after destruction. The need to conceal hidden traumas and injustices float slowly away.
I see the feminine body and the land as mirrors of each other. Both are claimed, controlled. The land is mined, flooded and taken; women’s bodies are possessed, covered and silenced in similar ways. The harm done can be hidden. And like the earth, the body holds its wounds and still finds ways to renew. There is a creative fertility that lies deep within both the body and the earth. Regeneration is central to both theme and process in my work; I continually return to the reproductive nature of pattern: a tree creates thousands of leaves that seem identical, yet each is unique if one looks closely enough.
‘My Fractured Cosmos’ explored how body and earth are joined through pattern. I traced the same patterns from the brain’s neural networks to branching trees to the cosmic web. We are made of the same matter as the land and the stars, broken and reassembled.
EF: I read in ‘Marigold Opacity’ by Amy Rosenblum-Martin that you took up hiking. What is your relationship to the earth, in the broadest sense? Dirt, soil, water bodies, insects, organic waste, birth, death, flora, fauna, animals. I do mean all of it.
SA: Hiking brought me back to the earth, and I feel a kinship with its broken and orphaned forms: fallen trees, driftwood, kelp torn loose and washed ashore. Like me, they are displaced. I collect them along with nature’s detritus: broken bark, volcanic rocks strewn along roadsides, handfuls of soil. I have cast kelp gathered from the shore, made rubbings of volcanic rock in the American Southwest, and laid soil in the shape of Attabad Lake for ‘Acts of Disappearance.’ Recombined, these fragments become the vocabulary of my installations.
I am drawn less to what moves than to what endures: wildflowers and grasses; lichen and moss; trees, rock formations, light dancing on the waves. Creatures too: red and blue birds in the preserves of Memphis and Oklahoma led to the red and blue veiled figures of my Bol series. Birth and death run through all of my work. A fallen tree becomes home to an ant colony; what decays feeds what grows. It is an embodied feeling of belonging to the earth, with the rhythms of creation moving through me.
My history is tied to moments of dissolution and life rebuilt, and I see the same cycle in the earth. In giving the fallen and discarded new life, I try to do the same: to resurrect a future from the wreckage of the past.
EF: Can you tell me more about your relationship to materials, from technological, image-based photography to gold leaf in ‘Alchemy of Becoming’? Does the medium come to you first, or the subject?
SA: In my work, many times the medium is dictated by what a project needs to communicate. But sometimes I design a project to explore a new medium itself. In Jaali, I set out to explore working with carved screens. Through that exploration, I began breaking them and reassembling them into new structures, a process of rebuilding from broken pieces that paralleled the life I was rebuilding.
For ‘The American Dream,’ the concept led. I modeled a fabric tent on the canvas tents survivors lived in and printed my digital collages of archival images onto it. The marigolds carry hope and renewal, ritual and remembrance. I made them from fabric so they would endure five months in the woods. In ‘Cosmic Veils,’ I recreated an imagined Veil Nebula, a place we can only know through images. Laser-cut fluorescent and transparent acrylic and dichroic film bathe the viewer in patterns of light. In ‘Alchemy of Becoming,’ gold leaf carries the concept itself. Alchemy, from the Arabic al-kimiya, is the transformation of base metal into gold, and of the self through that process.
The caps in ‘Acts of Disappearance’ came from the women of the Attabad colony, who once embroidered them at home; the caps are a core part of their identity. They speak to the disappearance of women and their labor from the land, and to reclaiming their presence.
Each project brings new experimentation. Sometimes it is like jumping into the fire, taking on a medium I have never used and discovering it as the work comes into being. For example, I learned to cast to preserve the impressions of kelp. I made cyanotypes for the first time on a beach, with sand, ocean water and kelp.
Ultimately, I keep returning to pen and ink. Sometimes space and economy demand it; sometimes I need line drawings to convert into other media via laser cutting.
EF: Your work keeps returning to organic forms: cellular structures, tree bark, kelp, stones, glaciers. When you turn toward something like a stone or a piece of kelp, what are you looking for? Is it the form itself, the history it carries, or something about how it sits in relation to the body?
SA: I love this question; thank you because it is all three. I am drawn first to the forms themselves and their visual patterns: the textures of bark, the branching of kelp, the bands in a stone, the fractures in glacial ice. Then there is the history they carry. Materials from nature are an archive. A stone holds memory of the ground it broke from, a glacier holds centuries of time in its ice, and the earth both conceals and preserves our history. When I gather or document these fragments and forms, I am gathering that memory too.
My own memory of encountering it is then layered atop its geological memory and makes its way into the work. I am drawn to how my body responds to them. Holding a stone or a piece of kelp, I feel connected to something larger than myself, to the land and to time.
EF: What does your process look like? What triggers or moves you into making work, and what drives you once you’ve begun?
SA: First, I am driven to create work that can uplift people and move toward positive change and liberation. Through my work, I illuminate issues of displacement, climate catastrophe, colonial violence, environmental racism, and land or labor extraction. These are all malignant social forces that I seek to acknowledge, while also creating aesthetic sanctuaries. I hope my work offers spaces of respite, renewal, peace and meditation.
In terms of process, much of my work emerges from my experience of being in natural landscapes or responds to my time on nature walks. I begin with a deep, embodied immersion in a place. Walking is a form of meditation for me. It opens me up to the world, its visual wonders, and its healing and renewing energy. I document the land and collect what I find along the way.
Alongside this, I research the histories embedded in a landscape: archival images of Greenwood’s destruction, the stories the women of Attabad shared with me, the unearthed micro and macro histories of a place. Sometimes the trigger is personal, as with Jaali and Bol, which emerged from moments of upheaval and transition in my own life. At other times, it is pattern. The geometric patterns of my heritage, how these patterns echo those of nature, the human body and the cosmos.
The North is not a discrete, isolated elsewhere; it is upstream
Each body of work is a process of becoming. The process leads to the work. It builds on itself, and the next steps emerge am immersed with the space and the materials. My installations are site-responsive and constantly evolving.
I offer three of my major projects to illustrate each process:
For ‘The American Dream’ (2021), I researched the Tulsa Race Massacre through archival images and the stories of the survivors’ descendants and spent time on the site. I was drawn to images of canvas tents people were housed in after the destruction of Greenwood, which resonated with the tents housing the displaced in Pakistan and around the world. I hiked the nature preserve for months until I knew every tree formation, then carefully selected the trees and the path that would lead visitors through the installations, to the lake and the clearing in the woods. I researched fabrics, drew petal designs for laser cutting, and devised a way to assemble thousands of marigolds, string them into garlands, and tie them onto chicken wire to drape on the trees, deciding on site how each would fall.
For ‘Cosmic Veils’ (2020), I researched materials and devised and improvised methods to recreate the light and color of the nebula. I arranged over a thousand laser-cut pieces in compositions, with only the general concept in mind, hung them one at a time, building the installation directly in the space until it was filled. It can be disassembled, stacked flat, and reassembled in new configurations.
‘Stories From the Core’ (2022) began with a collaborative proposal at a time of unprecedented loss and communal grief, from the pandemic to racial violence and environmental destruction, to offer the land as a force for healing. I mapped parklands to visit across Oklahoma’s regions and photographed landforms and fragments of landscape on my hikes. I digitally altered and collaged the images into art cards, collaborated with students on the graphic design, wrote meditations with Maryam Ahmad, and recruited libraries near each region. Then I played with the cards to design installations that fit each library’s spaces. The project later expanded into OK Parklands: A Meditation, an immersive projection of those landscapes.
Between major projects, I keep returning to drawing. From observation or from my own photographs of rocks, driftwood and tree forms. Drawing is a meditative process for me. It enables me to work, even in a small space and with few materials. It is immediate and contained versus the expansive installation work described above.
EF: What’s a question you’re sitting with right now that you don’t have an answer to?
SA: I do investigate questions through my work. Answers come through a process of discovery in the work itself. The question I am sitting with now is how do patterns shape our relationship with land? I have been exploring this through two terms I coined: generative and extractive patterns. Extractive patterns are imposed on land to colonize and control it. Grids divide continuous landscapes into parcels to be owned; mining claims cut mountains into extractable units, and open pits deplete the earth.
Generative patterns do the opposite: they unite. They reveal the underlying interconnectivity of creation. They radiate outward from a single point, where one becomes many. They travel across cultures and connect people, as quilting patterns do, carried between generations and continents. Can generative patterns offer another way of relating to contested land? How do I bring the two into dialogue in my work? That is what I am still discovering.
My current work centers on Shaml, an Arabic word for the gathering together of what has been scattered. I think of it as the bedrock of a person: the ground beneath us that holds us together when life breaks us apart. I have been gathering beach rocks, fragments of bedrock weathered loose and carried away by water. Though broken from the whole, each still carries the memory of where it came from. Like them, we are scattered by displacement, loss and the forces that move us. Gathering these fragments, I am exploring how we might reunite that bedrock into new wholes.
EF: Is there an image, a situation, an event, a feeling, or an object you’d want readers to carry with them while reading the finished essay?
SA: I would want readers to carry a feeling of belonging: that we are all part of the same whole. Beneath our differences of culture, place and history, we share the human condition. So many of the histories I work with are histories of extraction, but there are other ways of being in relationship, with the earth and with each other. So, I would also want us to carry a question about how we coexist. To carry the possibility of a future of living in mutual care.
Eman Farhan is a writer, artist and researcher based in Karachi, Pakistan. Their concerns circle urban, (dis)embodied, dysphoric and mythical queer experiences within a South Asian context. They are a finalist in English Imaginative Fiction for The Salam Award 2026, and a runner-up in English in the Pakistan Youth Poet Laureate Program 2025. You can find their work in Lakeer Magazine, The Blue Orange Magazine, and other publications. Website: 2eman.carrd.co