Concept & Illustration

‘Home’ is a series of illustrations I created after a short but beautiful visit back to Pakistan for the first time in 5 years. The series is based on the concept that ‘home’ is not necessarily a physical location but more importantly a feeling - of belonging, and of being alive in every moment. 

While the series focuses visually on my very nostalgic Pakistani-Islamabadi feeling of home, that isn’t where the idea ends for me or for anyone. I think home can be found in the most ordinary places and moments. It can be food that smells like comfort, and tastes even better than it smells. The way your mother blows prayers over you, or the feeling when you know the words to a song that your father listened to in his youth. That blanket of quiet serenity that envelops you when you walk into the mosque of your childhood. It can be the exact way the road curves to the right, or that first glimpse of hills rising up and into the clouds. It could be your person who just gets you, or the way your child’s lashes curl while she sleeps. 

Home lives in people, in colors and patterns and scents and sounds. This project is my personal attempt as an artist at capturing just a tiny sliver of that experience.