Corrosion is a piece where the visual narrative unfolds itself leaving the viewer to flow through the emotions and experience their own connection from a microscopic level to the cosmic scale and everything in between. It allows the audience to tap into what’s sacred in nature, making sense, finding the meaning and purpose from what they behold. An abstract work, painted with handmade watercolor from foraged earth pigments, a few blotches of beetroot ink and a little swirl of bronze gouache.
The artist Zainab Mumtaz created this piece for LOCUS, a quarterly gallery show & micro-grant program based in Chicago. It was inspired by Vagabond, a poem by Michele Popadich. How was this work similar or different to what she usually creates? To which she responded, “The process of creation is something that drives my work and gives it that deeper connection and meaning. Corrosion is most definitely one of the pieces that holds a special place in my heart, with the source unknown and a shared inspiration of colors, materials, emotions; It tells a story that reflects the thoughts of another person who had a whole creative process of their own to come up with the literary artwork.”
Vagabond by Michele Popadich
You lost your keys at midnight in the open lawn.
We had been lying in the grass for a tense
century of want & I imagined a vagabond
life with you. What if we never found them:
pitched beneath a hazy urban jungle where we forage
for mushroom caps in alleways showered with glass.
I chew forgotten coffee grounds in sidewalk cracks
& you floss my teeth with neat silvers of grass. I gift
you a red candy wrapper folded into a flower. You stalk
a blotchy city pigeon to the lake & we soak our toes
into a prunes. The sherbet sun wades in your hollow chest.
The pink polish cliff edged on my pinky nail finally
falls off, your beard forests down your neck. We forget
time not declared by the sun, by the length of my hair
fanned out & salted into a rusty storm. By the depth of our pebble
dimpled palms puzzle pieced together. At night, you fight shadows
in the closet of my thigh & I sink into a slumber deep enough for you
to hold onto. I wake early in a naked halo & howl at dark clouds
burdened with rain. Shelve a breath
on your shoulder. For now: we comb
in search of your keys, a return to civilization.
But imagine waking next to me in a dusty tent
tethered to nothing.
Zainab Mumtaz is a contemporary artist, colorist, and researcher based in Jeddah. She seeks to capture sense and emotions through abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, and Minimalism. Her practices explore the intersection between traditional and contemporary art, which is drawn to deconstructing the geometrical aspects of nature, exploring the mystery of existence, and finding the connection with the divine. Follow her on Instagram for more of her work.
