Humaira Abid’s show at the MAC depicts the pain and heartbreak of the refugee experience

The installation looming at the entrance to Humaira Abid’s solo exhibition at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture appears to be a treacherous, life-sized barbed wire fence. What makes the skin-ripping obstacle impossibly beautiful is the realization that the Seattle-based artist hand-carved each individual barb from wood.

Examining the exhibit closely, it’s mind-blowing to observe that every single piece in Abid’s “Searching for Home” series, from floppy shoes to rubber pacifiers, is also made of wood.

“I have people who come to my show, and the first thing they do is they sit very close … I hear them wonder, ‘How is she able to do that?’” Abid said with a laugh. “But once they get past that, they start asking, ‘What is the message behind it, what is she trying to say?’ ”

With “Searching for Home,” Abid is trying to say a lot. And while the art is pretty, the topic is not. Her thought-provoking installations explore the harrowing lives of refugees, especially women. For example, a blood-stained pair of panties (again, made of wood) dangles limply from the barbed wire fence, a reminder that women often suffer rapes and molestations on their journeys to find new homes free of violence.

“I think the art makes it easier for people to absorb these difficult topics and open up conversations about them,” Abid said. “My aim is to spread empathy and understanding for why people have to leave their homes … and to present hope that we can do something about it. That we can do something to help.”

Before her own migration to the Pacific Northwest in 2008, Abid grew up in Pakistan. Her parents were forced to leave their native India and move to Pakistan after Britain partitioned India in 1947. “While I do not have any similar reasons (as these refugees) for moving to another country, I have some experience with leaving home that I can relate,” Abid said.

Abid was also familiar with fences growing up; her father worked for the army, so the family lived near military bases. “I grew up with a lot of fences,” Abid said. “I still have a couple of scratches on my face from a barbed wire fence from when I was young and ran after my brothers when they tried to get a kite from the other side.”

Abid said she has always been interested in feminist issues and the restrictions placed on women’s freedoms throughout the world. She counts herself lucky that in her own childhood home, women were treated as equals to men. She was free to choose whom she would marry and what she would become. Not that her choices weren’t met with skepticism.

“My parents wanted me to be a doctor, but it just didn’t speak to me,” Abid said. “I was always interested in art, but it was considered to be a hobby … The family was very against me making a living as an artist.”

Even as a child, Abid collected things nobody wanted and made them into something. “Rather than hanging my clothes in my closet, I created a small installation in it … made out of flags of countries and toys,” Abid said. “That is what gave me happiness.”

At the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, Abid dedicated herself to disciplines traditionally dominated by men: wood sculpture/wood working and miniature painting. Woodworking was so out of the norm that Abid had to search outside of art school to find traditional carvers who could share their techniques with her.

“Woodworking is considered like more of a craft used to make furniture,” Abid said. “It is passed down from generation to generation.”

Abid’s affinity for two vastly different mediums – miniature painting and woodworking – seemed like too much to take on to her teachers and peers. “People thought I was a little crazy to do both,” Abid said.

It wasn’t until about five years after graduation from art school that Abid started combining both disciplines to create singular pieces. She depicted taboo topics and boundaries women had to navigate. “What better medium to talk about women’s issues than male-dominated mediums?” Abid asked.

Her feminist lens is firmly in place in “Searching for Home.” In the piece Provisions for a Journey, suitcases and travel bags are grouped together, representing the few things people might manage to carry with them when forced to flee violence. One carved suitcase contains a miniature painting by Abid of a real photo of Leila, a 5-year-old girl from Zambia. Leila’s mother was married at 14 to a diplomat who lived in the U.S. who abused her. Her story of fleeing her abuser, winning her children back and subsequently becoming a nurse, is a tale of inspiration to Abid.

Abid was working with Refugee Women’s Alliance in Seattle to better the lives of refugees when she met Leila’s mother and got permission to paint her daughter.

“I was so inspired by the mother,” Abid said. “People think that refugees will be a burden to society, and that is not true. She worked hard to become a nurse … She is so strong.”

It bears repeating: the luggage, their contents, the plastic wrinkly bag, are all made of wood. It takes personal will power not to prod the soft-looking clothes just to make sure that Abid didn’t prank the MAC.

Across from the luggage installation is a piece where Abid has constructed a mop pushing a pile of bloody pacifiers. The piece is Abid’s response to hearing about the terrorist incident in 2014 when the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school and killed 140 children. With a mother’s perspective, Abid, whose own daughter was 5 at the time, carved 39 bloody pacifiers to symbolize 39 weeks of pregnancy.

“I remember I couldn’t sleep for days after it happened,” Abid said. “I think the photographs of people washing the blood off the floors of the school affected me more than the actual event.

“There were pools and pools of blood,” Abid said. “That’s why I called the piece The Stains Will Last Forever.”

The tragic fate of Khaula Bibi, killed on her first day of school in the 2014 Peshawar School Massacre, was the launch point for another piece in the series called The World is Beautiful, and Dangerous Too. The striking installation is a full-scale swing hanging from the ceiling on two chains, with a miniature painting of the artist’s own daughter on the seat. A child’s pair of shoes covered in blood lies in front of the swing.

“The painting is of my daughter, swinging in a cactus garden, which looks very lush and beautiful from distance, but when you look close, there are thorns and she is not wearing shoes,” Abid notes. “So it’s like no matter how safe of a world we try to provide, we can never know how safe it really is.”