Noorain Inam | Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind

22 June - 21 July 2024

Indigo+Madder is thrilled to present Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind, Noorain Inam’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

In the new series of work, Noorain brings together surreal, dreamlike-scenes with symbolic images, uncanny assemblages, and motifs of water to consider ideas of belonging and identity. Made over several months, in London and the Cornish coast of England, where she was in residence at the historic Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, the new paintings use temporality to build narratives through an accumulation of experiences, objects and motifs.

While the works consider water bodies as sites of transformation, they also allude to how water itself represents concepts of birth, renewal, clarity and grief. Furthermore, a state of fluidity is employed to move across themes, contexts and forms within the works, as well as to connect them to each other. The scenes within the paintings move between surreal interiors and exterior spaces where unexpected objects and scenes are juxtaposed against each other. Broad, expressive panels of colour play with light and mood, often evoking the eerie and the enigmatic. Fantastic, humorous details abound, and destabilise. The titles of the paintings further echo this sentiment, and sometimes provide hints to the unfolding narratives. In Teeth made of wood, or so I was told, ethereal flames rise from a carousel suspended in a tumultuous, fluid landscape. Chairs with symbolic details and a rug hint at a domestic space that seems suspended in the unreal and intangible.

The works dwell on the hybridity of Noorain’s lived experiences in various ways. Alongside her training in miniature painting, she references surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, the horror genre in literature, American television series, myths from the Cornish coast and the history of abstraction. In A house on a hill, a car in the middle of the sea, they become sites for amalgamation, with childhood memories of the Arabian Sea examined alongside the Thames in London, and the beaches in Cornwall, as spaces for personal transformation and identity. The various blues and muddy browns of the different seas imbue the paintings with a translucent quality. The series also continues Noorain’s interest in surveying the personal to create new narratives, intimate relationships to place, and finding social connectedness to explore ideas of home. The unbearable lightness of forgetting my name, a highly detailed work, captures the drama of cloudy, stormy nights in Cornwall, with lightning and turbulent sea waves crashing on precipitous cliffs. Mythical, otherworldly characters and details emerge from what becomes a projection of the psychologically charged inner landscape.

Using water and fluidity to symbolise the larger themes of movement and unknowability, the works invite multiple perspectives, presenting themselves as enigmas that defy resolution.

The show is accompanied by a conversation between Noorain, who was in residence at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives at the time, and Belgian artist Bendt Eyckermans.

A conversation between Noorain Inam and Bendt Eyckermans

Bendt: When I look at your work, I feel like you construct metaphors that do not take you to a predetermined place, but just point the way. You invite us, the spectator, to become a co-author of the painting. I don’t know if this is intentional, or not, but can you tell me something about your creative process and how these narrations come into existence? Do they manifest in your mind during or before the painting?

Noorain: It’s interesting, I sort of see myself as the spectator too. I spend a long period of time with the paintings, that’s not to say I work on them every single day (though there have been periods of that). I try to remove myself from the narrative of the work. The impulse to paint of course comes from something personal, it could be an experience from my own life or someone else’s. Though somewhere during the process I begin to see it as a story, that’s when a lot of the motifs such as fire, lightning, bizarre animals come in. All in a space where they don’t necessarily belong.

This body of work was different, I spent months working on the paintings. In some ways they aged with me. Time feeds the narrations, it’s one of the best gifts a painter could have. The more you experience the more the narratives of the paintings shift. I’m interested in that relationship - between time and painting.

Real more

Noorain Inam was born in 1998 in Karachi. She lives and works in London. Noorain received the prestigious Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Residency Award for Emerging Artists which includes a residency at Porthmeor Studios, Cornwall in 2023. In 2024, she was awarded a second residency at the historic Studio 5 at Porthmeor.

Noorain studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and received her MFA in 2022. Before that she trained as a miniature painter in Karachi, later receiving her BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Through these experiences, she melds miniature painting techniques with Western expressive gestural painting styles, to create complex emotional landscapes. Her first solo exhibition A dream that visited every night was held at Indigo+Madder, London in 2023.

SELECTED WORKS