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My mission is to serve and educate my community on the value of cultural differences through traditional, Desi artwork. Celebrating cultural differences through the art of design.
I create in the traditional Desi art form of henna where I draw beautiful and intricate designs on the skin which will stain for up to 10 days! I can do both traditional designs and more contemporary "tattoo" style designs.
I first fell in love with henna ,or "mehndi", when I was a little girl. I grew up in Saudi Arabia with my Pakistani family. At every celebration, my aunts and cousins would always dress very beautifully and draw beautiful, intricate designs on eachother's hands and feet! They did it for us younger babies, as well, though they would just fill a pan with mehndi and we would stick our whole hand into it, thinking we were ther most fancy babies ever with our huge mehndi "blop" on our hands.
Moving back to America to live with my American family in my teenage years, I somehow forgot about the actual tradition of drawing with mehndi, though I never forgot the style. I would draw in the Desi style all over my hands and the hands of all of my friends. You could also find Desi remnants in all of my artwork, which I never seemed to notice. It was just "my style".
After visiting my family in Pakistan for the first time, about 10 years ago, I got to experience a Pakistani wedding! The bride's hands and feet were so delicately designed with so many different elements that seemed to flow seamlessly from her elbows to her fingertips! All of her younger cousins and I did mehndi on eachother and that is when I remembered where my love for these designs originally sparked!
After coming back home to America, I began to practice and learn more about natural henna and how to make it myself! I made many friends in the U.S henna community through Facebook and eventually gained enough courage to start sharing my artform at events.
I have now been doing henna at events for about 5 years and it has become my full-time job! I cannot express how blessed and honored I feel to be able to draw closer to my heritage with every design I draw and to be able to share this beautiful artform and culture with others.
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Henna, mehndi, body art
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