Miniature paintings create a controlled space. The picture plane is entirely about 'looking in' to a world as opposed to 'looking at' an image. Miniatures tend to deal with different spatial orders of framing; architectural framing, framing of the court, the garden, or the portrait.

These spatial devices employed in miniatures stand in contrast to the composition of my banner, which floats freely without borders or frames. In some ways, my banner is the by-product of spatial constraints. The banner spans three floors and is at no point visible in its entirety. The images unfold as one walks up the staircase. The lack of controlled viewing conditions forced me to think of a more fluid composition. My design takes images beyond the realm of miniatures into larger and far more confrontational scales. For example, the portrait becomes an independent icon, a staircase leads to nowhere, and weapons require no form. Even though my initial impulse was to do intricate, enclosed drawings this new medium required a degree of buoyancy. My interest lies in images that can sustain themselves in an awkward space--free of boundaries and un-rooted from tradition.

Miniature paintings tend to be labor intensive and time consuming, yet they fail to register as paintings in the heroic sense. My miniatures share an affinity with gestural abstraction in the way that many of the organic forms evolve through gesture and a relationship to material. Images for the banner were based on high and low sculpture, including popular works made of clay metal or wood, fantastical forms, birds, toys, utensils, and religious deities. Both humorous and bizarre in shape, these sculptures are ordinary and sacred at the same time.

This led to the series of drawings called "Midgets to Monsters"; some of the images from these appear in the banner. The images were scanned and transitioned into fully developed icons through a digital process. The process of painting, scanning, layering, and subverting allows infinite possibilities of serial narratives as well as mediating, morphing, and breaking down images. The work is not only about displacement but also about re-rooting; free of being prescribed by its own references.

Shahzia Sikander