Take Respite: Aisha Imdad’s Works Feel Like a Monsoon Rain, or Like Falling in Love

Aisha Imdad’s exhibition of paintings, The Allegorical Gardens, is a stunning display of virtuosity and literary allusion.

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Aisha Imdad: The Allegorical Gardens
May 17–July 3, 2025
Women and Their Work, Austin

As relieving as a working HVAC system in the humid summer heat is to the body, so are Aisha Imdad’s paintings upon one’s eyes and mind. Imdad’s exhibition, The Allegorical Gardens, presented at Women and Their Work gallery, invites visitors to slow down, rest, and reflect on the metaphors in their lives for a little while.

Founded in 1978, Women and Their Work opened their current space in 2021. The building, purchased by the nonprofit, provides the gallery with a stability that is all too rare for Austin’s arts organizations and nonprofits in general. The square gallery space is large enough to be divided into smaller areas, and windows occupy the entire length of one wall. The windows allow natural light to enhance the paintings and open onto a view of the courtyard. It is the perfect space for Imdad’s exhibition.

Imdad, who studied visual art at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, and is now based in Texas, draws literary, historical, and ecological references into her intricate paintings. One allegorical story depicted in several of the works is poet Farid ud-Din Attar’s the Conference of the Birds. In this twelfth-century poem, the birds seek a sovereign and journey to the home of the Simorgh, the mythical winged creature. Each bird represents a human fault, and along the way, they face challenges.

In an accompanying text for the exhibition, Imdad writes, “The final lesson is: WE ARE WHAT WE SEEK. Hence, our struggles are not guided by some external forces but by our inner strength and belief in our own abilities to reach our best selves.”

In The Conference of Birds, The Journey of Self: The Valley of Love (Ishq) (2025), Imdad’s exquisite painting matches the ferocity of a new love. A river bisects the paper. Blue jays, peacocks, swans, and pigeons fly or frolic on the page. The river is depicted from above. In contrast, the trees are depicted from their sides, with the edges of the page sometimes acting as the “ground.” The resulting disorientation is the delicious feeling of staring straight up into a canopy of branches and swirling around until you don’t know which direction is which—a little bit like falling in love.

In The Moonsoon Gardens: Megh Malhar Series I (2024), storm clouds that could be mistaken for tumultuous ocean waves release rain onto flying birds, and trees swirl in the wind. The landscape is dark with black paint soaking the page. Flashes of pink, green, and purple highlight the flowering trees and scrub. Imdad manages to make everything in the painting feel drenched, and yet she renders the delicate patterns of the peacocks’ tails. The minute detail in Imdad’s works balances the movement in them, as if she could bottle the energy of a monsoon rain.

In the gallery’s courtyard, dreams collected from visitors are tied to strings that dangle from the branches of an immense pecan tree. The threads are weighted down with bells that tinkle in the occasional breeze. Visitors’ dreams range from the day-to-day wishes of getting into university to the grand hope for a free Palestine. Under the shade of the branches, the heat still creeps over me. A fountain gurgles, reminding me of the severe drought the region is experiencing.

I’m glad the tree survived the recent thunderstorm that brought seventy-five mile-per-hour winds and hail through parts of Austin. The toxic feel of a plastic artificial lawn under my feet brings me back to the world outside the confines of an exhibition, like stepping through the gates of a garden and back onto a busy city street filled with exhaust fumes. We can try to nurture nature as best we can in our gardens, but we are also destroying the real thing to satisfy our insatiable desires for ephemera and immediacy. Imdad’s The Allegorical Gardens, in its exacting portrayal, is a powerful reminder of the balances we must strive to create.