About Us
About EarthwareStudios.Karachi
(ES.K)
EarthwareStudios creates original products inspired by and fashioned from, the earth. Since 2017, every piece, whether for living spaces, dining tables or décor, is unique and delicately crafted.
We are a retail space with a conscience – ES.K aims to support craft families by opening up new non-traditional market avenues for the sale of their products and inadvertently increasing their incomes. Craft families’ especially working with clay/pottery and copper works are suffering due to a shrinking market. ES.K strongly believes in supporting communities and sustainable solutions.
About Artist
Shazia Zuberi, has been involved in working with low income communities (both rural and urban) with specific focus on women and “the girl child” in Pakistan, while simultaneously working as an artist (ceramist). Shazia did her Bachelors degree in Economics with a minor in Studio Arts from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, USA in 1992 and her masters in Gender Studies from SOAS, London, 2006/07, England. Since graduation she has combined her development work (specifically focusing on women’s rights) with her Art. In recent years, Shazia Zuberi, works on issues related to our natural environment and gender.
She first began working in clay as a teenager during her O’levels (fleeting as the experience was). Since that day she has felt eternally bound to the malleable nature of clay; its ability to mature with time and provide for us. Bound as a craft, work in clay has been rejected as an art and its contribution to the artistic community. As a ceramist and studio potter she relishes in its ability to provide and yet be transformed into a non-utilitarian form playing with space, both positive and negative.
Form, texture, color and a narrative (along with a chemical transformation through heat and fusion) together enable clay to emerge into an art form- lending its own properties coupled with its biographer’s motive. Initially the ability to manipulate clay was exciting but as she grew more familiar and gained more control-clay enabled the expression of thoughts throughout the process of development of a single piece in multiple layers resulting in a complex intangible thought process hidden from a viewer’s eye. It allows Shazia to express herself like no other medium has done before.
She has over the years developed a language that reflects the natural, organic form – paying a tribute to geology and landscape. Shazia has intermittently written art reviews for Newsline, NuktaArt Magazine and other publications in a freelance capacity; and has had a number of solo and group shows. She is currently living and working as a practicing artist in Karachi, Pakistan.
