The artist
A sculptor who traded chisels for fire.
“What is burned into the wood remains as both wound and image.”
EA is the artist behind Studio 21/7. She trained in fine art at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, specialising in sculpture — a discipline that begins not with the image but with the material: its weight, its grain, its resistance.
That training never left. Where most pyrography is drawn onto prepared boards, EA works on live-edge, untreated slabs — often discarded wood, reclaimed — keeping the bark line, the knots, the seams and the silhouette. Each piece begins with the slab itself: grain and imperfection are embraced, the material guiding the final image, and the burn follows. The result sits somewhere between drawing and sculpture — objects that stand, lean and hold a room rather than hang flat against it.
Her instruments are pens and open flame. Pyrography pens — heated nibs in place of ink — carry the line and detail; a torch lays in broad tone and scorches the live edges. Tone builds in passes, from pale caramel to near-black carbon. There is no paint and no pigment anywhere in the work. Everything you see is wood and burn.
Her creatures — crows, octopuses, sirens and other imagined beings — emerge through marking, scorching and revealing. The work engages resilience, rupture and self-reinvention: burning as transformation rather than erasure, surfaces that hold evidence of process, pressure and persistence.
In her words · from The First Collection
“Working with wood and the transformative force of heat, I create hand-burned images of creatures using pyrography and various burning tools. Drawn directly onto raw surfaces, my crows, octopuses, and other imagined beings emerge through a process of marking, scorching, and revealing.
My practice engages with resilience, rupture, and self-reinvention. Through burning, discarded wood is altered into something charged with fantasy, memory, and emotional presence. The act of burning becomes both a method of image-making and a trace of transformation rather than erasure.
The work exists between darkness and renewal, exploring the experience of shedding imposed identities and confronting the harsher passages of womanhood. Rather than offering resolution, my surfaces hold evidence of process, pressure, and persistence — suggesting that what is marked is not lost, but remembered differently.”
