During a time of illness, political unrest and social reconstruction, two women pieced together a joint mythos to make sense of the chaos around them. Combining their personal histories and cultural observations, the women formed new realities within the pages of two sketchbooks. Using their similar, yet unique, processes of creating, they gave new life to discarded materials, layering scraps of paper to create abstracted landscapes. The women continued pouring their anger, pain and confusion into their creations, watching figures emerge from lines of ink and torn paper edges to inhabit new planes of existence. The book pages could no longer contain these fragmented worlds, and spilled out into different forms, occupying three dimensions and transforming the womens’ own space.

Detail of one sketchbook by Monica Lloyd and Aneesa Shami.