​MEMORY OF WATER
Ongoing Project

BRITISH COUNCIL GO DIGITAL: PAKISTAN / WALES | PKUK NEW PERSPECTIVES 2022 

Memory of water is an experimental undertaking intended as a conversation between two artists across media, Mererid Hopwood (poet) and Ayessha Quraishi (visual artist), exploring a shared theme. Fluid in nature, water cuts across geography, surpassing boundaries and confines and evokes the experiential over the analytical. It is no wonder consciousness is described as a ‘stream’, and the river is a metaphor for the passage of time where no one steps into the same water twice.

​Mererid Hopwood came to the Chair of the Welsh and Celtic Studies in January 2021. She has spent her career in the fields of languages, literature, education and the arts. She has won the National Eisteddfod of Wales’ Chair, Crown and Prose Medal and in 2016 won the Welsh Book of the Year prize for poetry for her collection of poems, Nes Draw. She has been children’s poet laureate of Wales (Bardd Plant Cymru) and in 2018 won the Tir na n’Og prize for her writing for children. In 2020 she won the inaugural Emyr Humphries Prize for the most innovative writing about Wales. She has composed words for musicians, visual artists and dancers, and has taken part in literature festivals in Europe, Asia and South America. She has translated many works of literature into Welsh including plays from Spanish and German for Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. She is Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the Academi Gymreig, and Honorary President of the Waldo Williams Society. She is the secretary of the Academi Heddwch Cymru, Wales’ Peace Institute.

​Ayessha Quraishi (b. 1970) lives and works in Karachi. Having received her initial art training from Karachi-based educator Nayyar Jamil, she has been working for over three decades on developing her signature technique and visual language. Her practice employs gestural mark-making. And she often integrates drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and digital media to explore themes of impermanence and memory. Quraishi is an accomplished artist, a finalist for the 2022 Sovereign Asian Art Prize and the recipient of the Installation Award, ADA Awards (2021). Her recent exhibitions include Sculptor/Sculpture, COMO Museum, Lahore (2022) and the 2022 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Art Central, Hong Kong (2022). Her monograph Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works: 1985-2020 accompanying her retrospective with the same name was published in February 2020. Quraishi's work is in private collections in Europe, the United States of America and Asia and the permanent collections of HBL Mega Towers and the Rangoonwala Foundation UK.