Noorain Inam: The Pakistani-Sindhi artist scaling up dreamscapes

Noorain Inam is a Pakistani-Sindhi artist bringing a fresh voice to the art world through her scaling of Indo-Persian miniature painting techniques onto canvases large enough to host the disquieting details of her dreamlike topographies. Rife with myth and symbolism, Noorain’s work is textured with personal memories, mystic elements, and cultural emblems, which she once again debuted to the world in her second solo exhibition this summer in London.

“I think [painting] was something I’ve wanted to do for as long as I could remember,” Noorain shares with Dazed MENA. “I do it because I genuinely love the work and that sense of discovery when you come up with an idea and bring it to life.”

There’s a sense of whimsy and otherworldliness that lives and breathes in each of Noorain’s paintings. Phantasm encroaches on every square-inch of each canvas, seeping through the hues of her foregrounds or dancing across the work in mystic succession. The work is suffused with astonishing detail, as though a still rendering of an evanescent reverie. “When I was younger I used to make drawings of characters out of anything I could get my hands on. It still feels that way.”

Noorain grew up in Karachi, where she honed her technical skills as a miniaturist when she was 15, her development process beginning with stringent, repetitive practice. At the centre of her early training, unexpectedly, were cane chairs she had at home in Karachi. For six months, her teacher had her draw and paint the same chair every single day, damaging it slightly so Noorain could closely perceive the subtle change. It was here that Noorain learned how to paint without the use of external references; addressing the canvas unflinchingly to produce her work. Through this training, she cultivated the patience, precision, and instinct that manifests in her art today.

“I’ve been trained as an Indo-Persian miniature painter so a lot of my references and research come from manuscripts of this religion,” Noorain tells Dazed MENA. “I’ve always drawn from what’s around me and my own lived experience. I think we have such a tapestry of mythologies, I love bringing elements of that into the paintings.”

Having attended the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, Noorain graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2019. She then moved to London in pursuit of a Master’s in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. There, she leaned into the transition from painter to artist, imbuing narratives into the canvas with her paint. “I had a pretty rigorous academic background but my approach to painting has always been the same and that’s to tell stories, whether it be about love, heartbreak, life itself. I feel like as long as those elements are alive and well I’ll continue to make work.”

Her education and training culminated in two solo exhibitions, the first of which occurred only six months after her graduation. Her second, Go back to sleep, it’s just the wind, exhibited a body of work crafted across six months of an artistic residency at Porthmeor Studios in Cornwall. The exhibition was hosted at Indigo+Madder in London in the summer of 2024. The size of her paintings range in considerable iterations, some only 10 by 15 centimetres while others span over two meters, not allowing her background in miniaturism to stifle her ambitions for expansive storytelling. 

Like recurring dreams, some of her pieces retain the same motifs: birds, seas, fire, familiar domestic spaces. Always with a patterned border framing the piece as though curtains for a stage. In most paintings, the fire cuts across the canvas, illuminating the gloom otherwise swallowing the other elements. Through the surrealism of it all, it’s difficult to discern the longing and grief that clearly live in the work, but the fear is unmistakable. Having grown up reading Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, Noorain’s rich inner world as it pertains to horror is distinct in each piece. 

Noorain is currently working on her solo booth debut for the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) in Miami with her exhibition host, Indigo+Madder. She spends her days in a wood workshop and her nights painting—likely finding new ways to forge her background in Indo-Persian techniques into staggeringly intricate work. “Navigating my field comes with its own set of challenges, especially as a woman of colour,” Noorain explains to Dazed MENA. “So much of my work is rooted in where I come from and my own experiences—I hope there’s a better understanding of our histories and the philosophies behind making art. I hope I get to contribute to our visibility as not only painters but as thinkers.”