Nargis Naqvi | Childhood Memories of Makkah

Nargis Naqvi is a Canadian-based painter whose work reflects heritage, womanhood, faith, and lived experience. Born in Ireland, raised in Saudi Arabia, educated in the United States, and now based in Canada, her cross-cultural life shapes the stories she tells through art. Drawing on Pakistani roots, Saudi upbringing, and Western education, she creates paintings centered on memory, identity, belonging, and the quiet strength of women.
Working in painting, mixed media, acrylic, oil, and spray paint, Nargis builds layered surfaces rich with texture, color, and symbolism. Her practice is intuitive and deeply personal, inspired by fabric, patterns, nature, and spiritual reflection. She is drawn to resilience, stillness, and the unspoken emotions carried within the body and heart.
Her current work explores home, displacement, and inner grounding, while celebrating bright florals and figurative imagery that bring warmth, curiosity, and connection

 

I've been to Makkah so many times it feels like a second home. It's a place I could go to casually, the way you'd drop in on a close friend without much planning, because living so close to it, that closeness gets built into you. It becomes a kind of homesickness that sits in the heart and doesn't let up until you're standing there again.
This painting is a collage of collective instances, not one specific visit but the residue of many, and it doesn't try to capture everything, there's more in my memory than what made it onto the canvas. I used texture, gold, and collage to bring in the diverse nations that are always circling the Kaaba, people from everywhere converging on the same point at once. Under the rich black cloth covering the Kaaba, I painted in the brick, because that structure underneath is easy to forget when all you see is the covering, and I wanted it there. The silver casing around the black stone is in there too, a detail that's small in real life but impossible to miss once you've stood in front of it.
The pigeons are woven through the piece because they never leave that area, they're as constant a presence as the people. I also painted in the dual-toned arches of the mosque, and the sight of people reading Quran in nearly every corner, which is one of those things you see so often there that it becomes part of the architecture itself, like the building is built for it.
The painting is made up mostly of thick acrylic paint, gold leaf, spray paint, and collage, layered the way the memories themselves are layered.