Children's book Illustration

Some images of recent work..

 

My piece in Awaaz Magazine winter 2026

idhrudhar press

My piece in Superpresent Magazine

Supepresent Vol 6, No 1

Curating the Curators

https://ctc-chapter1.blogspot.com/

Coalesce Collective

Coalesce Collective is a critique-driven artist collective bringing together five practitioners whose work spans contemporary ceramics, design research, pedagogy, and South Asian craft traditions: Shazia Mirza, Huma Tanvir Lonne, Usman Khalil, Amjad Ali Daudpota, and Nisar Ahmed.

The collective made its public debut through Clay Across Time, a group exhibition featuring twenty ceramic artists from across Pakistan. Conceived as more than an exhibition platform, Coalesce was established as a long-term professional community where artists collectively examine, challenge, and refine each other's work through rigorous critique and sustained dialogue.

Grounded in diverse yet complementary practices, the collective values conceptual clarity, material intelligence, technical excellence, and continuous artistic evolution. Rather than simply sharing finished works, members openly test ideas, analyse processes, and push projects towards greater depth and resolution. This iterative approach allows each exhibition to become both a public presentation and a visible marker of artistic growth.

For galleries, institutions, and collectors, Coalesce Collective represents a rare convergence of academic rigour, studio practice, and living craft knowledge, bringing together artists committed not only to making exceptional work but to continually expanding the possibilities of contemporary ceramics.

Tactile Reverence

 

TACTILE REVERENCE

For centuries, ornament has been understood as something to be seen. TACTILE REVERENCE begins with a different assumption: perhaps ornament can also be read through the hand.

This ongoing ceramic research project explores the possibility of building an ornamental language whose primary audience is not the eye, but touch. Drawing from Islamic geometry, arabesque, Braille and contemporary research into tactile cognition, I investigate how rhythm, symmetry, sequence and memory can be experienced through the fingertips. In this work, Braille is not added to ornament as an act of accessibility. Instead, tactile perception becomes the starting point from which ornament itself is constructed.

The project emerged from a simple observation. Most historical ornamental systems, regardless of their sophistication, were designed for visual perception. Yet touch possesses its own intelligence. It understands direction, texture, contrast, repetition and spatial relationships in fundamentally different ways. Rather than adapting visual ornament for blind users, I am interested in asking what an ornamental tradition would look like if touch had always been its primary language.

Working primarily in ceramics, I develop tactile surfaces, sculptural plates and architectural installations that invite slow exploration rather than immediate visual consumption. These works are intended equally for blind and sighted audiences, encouraging both to experience ornament as a gradual process of discovery. The hand becomes a tool of reading, orientation and contemplation, while the ceramic surface functions as a landscape through which knowledge unfolds over time.

At its heart, TACTILE REVERENCE is an attempt to expand the language of ornament beyond decoration. It asks whether ornament can become a way of thinking, remembering and knowing, a quiet conversation between the body, material, geometry and the sacred.

Daud Ki Maina

DAUD KI MAINA

DAUD KI MAINA is an independent art, storytelling and design practice by Shazia Mirza that explores how handmade toys, illustrated books and everyday acts of making can become tools of cultural continuity, imagination and care. Rooted in the domestic economies of South Asia, the project treats sewing, storytelling, drawing and craft not as nostalgic activities but as contemporary forms of authorship capable of responding to the social and cultural challenges of our time.

The project emerged from a desire to create meaningful alternatives to an increasingly homogenized childhood shaped by global brands, algorithmic entertainment and shrinking linguistic diversity. Instead of licensed characters and disposable play, DAUD KI MAINA develops an expanding world of handcrafted textile toys and bilingual books whose stories are grounded in Pakistani landscapes, vernacular speech, local humour and everyday life. Its characters are intentionally open-ended—children are invited to rename them, invent stories and build emotional relationships through play rather than consumption.

Every toy and every book is designed, written, illustrated and tested through direct engagement with the public in local craft markets. These encounters form an essential part of the practice, allowing conversation, memory and commerce to function together as a living process of cultural research rather than simply retail. The project understands markets as places where stories are exchanged as much as objects, and where feedback from children, parents and grandparents continually shapes new work.

Rather than building a brand, DAUD KI MAINA is building a slow-growing cultural ecosystem in which toys generate stories, stories become books, books nurture language, and making itself becomes a quiet act of resistance against the speed, uniformity and disposability of digital culture. It is an ongoing commitment to reclaiming childhood through imagination, locality and the enduring value of the handmade.

https://www.instagram.com/daud.ki.maina/