The semi-abstract works that comprise ‘Leaves in Love’ by the talented and pathbreaking Glasgow-based artist, Sarmed Mirza are inspired by the idea, embraced in some form by many cultures, of the transmigration of souls. This notion emphasises the importance of cultivating a compassionate world and of departing this existence in a state of love. The images are suffused with the metaphor of birds as aspects of the soul. 

The series of paintings and prints was inspired by visits to the Dhanakosa Buddhist meditation retreat in Balquidder, Scotland and the Butchart Gardens in Canada (the latter of which began as the project of Japanese garden designer, Isaburo Kishida). and are designed to facilitate collective contemplation through a play of colour, texture, and scale. 

Perhaps as a result, the works are redolent of what Scottish intellectual and poet, the late Professor Kenneth White might have termed, a geopoetic consciousness, a striving for balance and union with humans forming an integral and unified part of the natural world. 

‘Leaves in Love’ suggests departure on a journey, as well as the sheafs of book, perhaps of ‘turning over a new leaf’, and in the seraphic manner of ecstatic contemplation favoured by mystics in most traditions, that each leaf - each soul - constantly is in love with all others. 

The original paintings were done in oil, sometimes with an acrylic base, on wood. Using innovative technology, these then were photographed by the artist to produce large-scale prints on canvas. 

But the prints are not merely reproductions, as in consonance with the idea of metempsychosis, each change in medium or scale alters the image - things previously unnoticed assume prominence - and evokes new apprehensions in unexpected and sometimes revelatory ways. 

One also is reminded of the maxim that while there are shared defining characteristics within a category (e.g., all leaves share specific features) as recognised by Mediaeval scholastics in the concept of quiddity, certain configurations driven by physics recur far more widely throughout the universe. 

The works are vibrant and are filled with light, life, and playfulness. Above all they evince a profound creative dissonance which seems redolent of the fruitful dislocation and deliberate asymmetry of the classical gardens of China and Japan. In this way, the shapes and colours draw one in, deeper and deeper, until it is as though one were entering the synaesthetic poesis of a dream-state. 

And so, the bird turns to flame, then to a corpuscle pulsing through our heart, then to the breath of a saint on stained glass, then to a fleck of stone on a Caledonian hillside, the glint of a gem in the crown of an Iron Age queen, a beach at low tide, the sound of an arpeggio…  

The fourth wall dissipates. The figures begin to flicker and dance in the scintillating cadence that emerges when an artistic piece really comes together and communicates and inspires. Like the countervailing colours that are absorbed by the materials and like the soul itself, the observer too is invisible yet ever-present within the work.

One emerges from ‘Leaves in Love’ conscious of an ontological shift, a changed view of the cosmos and of oneself. And that, surely, is the prime function of art. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Suhayl Saadi is a writer living in Glasgow, Scotland. His work is fired by the tension between the gritty and the mystical, and by music, and has been subject to widespread academic exegesis.

Books include The Snake (1997), The Burning Mirror (2001), Psychoraag (2004), The White Cliffs (2005) and Joseph’s Box (2009). He has written extensively for BBC Radio and also for the stage. He was British Council writer-in-residence at George Washington University.

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/suhayl-saadi