Nargis Naqvi | As She Leaves

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

 

My work grows out of lived experience, memory, identity, and the emotional spaces between belonging and distance. As an artist, I am drawn to figurative painting because the human form allows me to speak about what is deeply personal while still opening a space for others to see themselves in the work. My practice is rooted in layered paint, texture, color, and symbolism, often shaped by my own experiences of culture, faith, womanhood, home, and displacement.
The theme of this IHM exhibition speaks to me because I have lived with multiple geographies and identities shaping who I am. For me, home is not only land or location — it is something felt in the body, remembered by the mind, and carried in the heart. My work reflects that understanding. I am interested in how memory, faith, nature, and emotional experience shape our sense of belonging, and how a person can feel both rooted and far away at the same time.
Through these paintings, I want to explore the quiet emotional terrain of home, departure, and inner grounding. I hope the viewer feels the tenderness, complexity, and spiritual reflection within the work, and is invited to think about their own relationship to place — where they come from, what they carry, and what continues to live inside them even when they are far from home.