"Ethereal spaces" Painting

Braille—a tactile system through which blind and low-vision readers encounter language by touch—offers Mariya Shaikh a powerful way of thinking about how meaning can exist beyond the eye. Just as Braille transforms language into touch, abstraction allows a painting to be felt before it is understood. Colour, mark, texture, and repetition become a quiet vocabulary, an invitation to encounter what may not always be seen, but can still be sensed and known.

Based in Sindh, Pakistan, Mariya Shaikh is a visual artist, researcher, and educator whose practice moves between painting, drawing, and textile-informed abstraction. At the heart of her work is an ongoing question: What is grace? She understands grace as a form of attention—a quiet meeting point between memory, spirituality, material, and lived experience.

Rooted in the craft heritage of Sindh, Shaikh’s paintings evolve through layered pigment, repetition, hand-made marks, and shifting surfaces. She is drawn to the capacity of a surface to hold time: a gesture can carry a memory, a place, a trace of touch, or a feeling that resists language. Her works often hover between landscape, textile, and script, creating spaces that feel both intimate and expansive.

In her recent Braille- and kantha-informed works, repetition becomes a tactile form of language. Rather than using Braille as literal transcription, she draws from its relationship to touch, perception, and inner reading. The rhythmic logic of kantha stitching allows her to think through tenderness, duration, repair, and the human need to make meaning. These paintings move between sight and no-sight, between what is visibly present and what is sensed, remembered, or imagined.

Shaikh approaches abstraction as a way of listening. Through colour, layered gestures, and material traces, she creates paintings that can be felt before they are understood—works that invite stillness, contemplation, and a renewed awareness of the unseen dimensions of experience.

Education is an essential part of Shaikh’s artistic practice. As an art and design educator at the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, she works with students through research-led processes, material inquiry, conceptual development, and the relationship between traditional craft and contemporary visual language. The exchange between the studio and the classroom continually shapes her work, keeping it open to questions of learning, inheritance, identity, and transformation.