An afternoon in the studio with nurse-turned-artist Fawziyah Rahman

Interview and words by Dalia Al-Dujaili

When Fawziyah shows me into her studio, the first thing I notice is how at-home she wants me to feel. We sit at a rickety table and the sun streams through single-pane windows, casting brilliant light and shadows across her work. The second thing I notice is the notebooks; piled up on one another. I squeal with delight and tell Fawziyah my favourite thing is peering into an artist’s sketchbook. Luckily, she’s not the private kind of painter, so she takes me through the pages of her brilliantly bizarre illustrations.

Fawziyah Rahman is a self taught artist based in London. From looking at her paintings, you mightn’t be surprised to learn that she studied as a nurse and worked during the pandemic. Her paintings are vibrantly coloured assortments of physiologies and body parts, or shapes resembling organs. She’s clearly interested in exploring the physical form as an abstraction through surreal scenes, movements and palettes, and the relationship between body and mind.

The artist qualified as a nurse in 2018 – mostly because her “parents wanted [her] to be a doctor” but she claims she was “too dyslexic to pass the exam”, but also because she’s always had an interest in biology – and started painting in her final year of her nursing course. She recalls her mum giving her the organs when she went to the butchers. But things began to shift during the pandemic. Fawziyah was working A&E shifts in 2020, and having ADHD, it wasn’t easy to see an emergency happening in “every direction you face,” as well as 12 hour shifts with half hour breaks.

I wonder if Fawziyah ever questions her transition from nursing to art. “Doing the art… I think it’s a necessity. I realise I have always been doing it, maybe through doodling on my books, my lecture notes are just covered in drawings because I can't concentrate. I can't focus on what someone is saying for long periods of time.” It seems as if her time studying seeped its way unintentionally into the work, seen in the “diagrammatic element” of Fawziyah’s work, because the lecture hall has been where she’d been drawing “without actually being conscious of it. I can tell which lectures I was more nervous in or which ones I really enjoyed, or found boring, from what’s drawn around my notes.”

“Working in A&E, you see that people are capable of doing a lot of horrible things to each other,” Fawziyah divulges. “I think there's always a reason behind it. And there's something they haven't unpacked or there's some of their own trauma. And I think we all carry some kind of trauma one way or another that influences how we behave.” Making art is a reflective process, it necessitates retrospection, and the 28-year-old artist believes that doing something that “helps you reflect and understand yourself, and process what you’re feeling, and making sense of the world you exist in, is really important”. For Fawziyah, that happens to be drawing and painting.

“I won’t know what I'm feeling, I can't articulate it,” she opens up. “But I do some doodling and turn that into a bigger painting where I can stretch my arms out to reach the lines I'm tracing from the drawing that I did. And while I paint to fill in the colours, I start making sense of what I was processing while I was just doodling… it is very unconscious.”

For Fawziyah, who also has dyslexia and suspects she’s on the Autism spectrum, neurodivergency is a “superpower” as well as a “hidden disability”. She decided to get formally assessed at the end of last year, and she says the push to do so was after suffering from PTSD triggered by her experiences on the frontlines of the pandemic. “There’s a lot of adapting to do [with neurodivergency], that’s where masking comes in,” she tells me, but despite finding some of her traits annoying herself, Fawziyah has learnt how those same traits can be used “as a power”. From participating in shows like ‘Ajker’ by Oitij-Jo, being featured in VICE and Dazed, and working with the likes of Pxssy Palace, one can only assume these powers of hers will continue to strengthen her craft.

Follow Fawziyah here.