Bushra Khaalid's practice sits at the meeting point of ecology and memory. Her paintings and mixed-media assemblages return, again and again, to the flower cut at its peak: a small, precise emblem of the wider environmental decay she sees in how we consume and discard the natural world for visual pleasure. Having trained first in Lahore and then in Trondheim, her own trajectory carries an undercurrent of migration and translocation, and her work extends this disconnection to questions of identity, particularly the pressures placed on women to remain beautiful, still and admired past their natural moment, as in her use of bridal red velvet folded into a flower that was never grown to be one. Her paintings ask what it costs, ecologically and personally, to hold onto something past its living purpose.

Bushra Khaalid is a painter and mixed-media artist based in Lahore. Working with oil paint, preserved flowers, cloth and acrylic enclosures, she explores the distance between nature as a living system and nature as an object of display. Her work also considers how beauty, memory and emotion become attached to objects we try to keep.

Khaalid holds a Master's in Fine Art from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway, and a Master's in Painting from the College of Art and Design, University of the Punjab, Pakistan. She has exhibited in Pakistan and Norway and was awarded the Arjumand Merit Prize in 2017.