Hafsa Murtaza, Islamic Garden: Water Innovations, 2025
Fabric marker, acrylic, gouache, embroidery floss, glass beads on cotton canvas.
9 in x 12 in
The work acts like a map of imagined yet recognizable topographies, inviting yet oddly disorienting at times. Alhambra and Granada's fifteenth-century water innovations are depicted, like staircases built with carved railings that thrust water down mountains with enough force to create arching fountains without a pump, which divide into four-part water channels intersected by a fountain of lions from which a tiger strolls out. Women sit conversing in a Central Asian pagoda in the shade of a plane tree flourishing with embroidered flower motifs, around which Northern Cardinals fly.
