EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Noormah Jamal
My practice begins with drawing as a way of thinking through memory, symbolism, and inherited history. Across painting and sculpture, I build layered surfaces where mark-making functions as excavation rather than illustration. Figures, landscapes, plants, and animals operate as symbolic carriers of meaning, holding fragments of personal and collective experience shaped by migration, displacement, and belonging. Trained in Mughal miniature painting, I extend its precision of line into a more urgent, tactile language, where images are constructed through accumulation, repetition, and carving across material surfaces.
At the core of my work is the idea of witnessing: who sees, who remembers, and what remains when histories are displaced. I think of my practice as shaped by internal conversations between different versions of myself, childhood perception and adult understanding, inherited stories and lived experience, belonging and distance. These conversations form a way of constructing images that are neither fully archival nor purely imagined, but something in between: speculative reconstructions of memory.
