Maznah Ahmad

To achieve the affect of her flourishing paintings, Maznah Ahmad seems to call upon some deeper notion of the elements. The collage-like texture of her work jumps from the wall. Using mixed media, dyes and paints, her abstract art stretches across the canvas, an eruption of color, freckled and scribbled designs, reminiscent of stained silk, the ocean floor, or a universe full of vast, red stars. Born in Singapore to Indonesian-Malaysian immigrants, her rich background informs her work to the extent that her art becomes the telling of it.

Currently residing in Australia and working on her doctoral research in fine art, she is far from her family, but still carries out tradition in her art by questioning that which she has inherited and what she owns; she struggles also to find a balance between Western and Eastern philosophies. The process of painting, to Ahmad, is a metaphysical journey. She possesses, and hence produces, a sensory knowledge that far surpasses our expectations. Representing the texture of her heritage, and the inner world the self inhabits, Ahmad eases the viewer into a landscape of abstraction with substance – the result of which is poetry.