1b To Become Dust Ahmad

Thu, Jun 5, 2025,67 Online via Zoom

Talk

Fellowship 25 Conversations: Sobia Ahmad and Clare Sheedy

Several artists in Fellowship 25 explore how our perception and understanding are shaped by emotional and sensory experiences. For example, Clare Sheedy integrates photographs and poems in both standard text and braille, offering a multi-layered experience that reflects her processes of inquiry and invites us to think and feel through different states of knowing and unknowing. Sobia Ahmad’s process-driven work challenges conventional ways of seeing. Many of her photographs were taken on reversal film stock and printed as negatives, inverting the way we typically perceive images. Ahmad’s meditative exploration of ecological concerns invites viewers to connect emotionally with her work, while emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things and diverse ways of knowing.

Join Sobia Ahmad and Clare Sheedy as they discuss their practices and themes in Fellowship 25.

Image credit: Sobia Ahmad,To Become Dust that Sings it’s Melody to the Night, 2024

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Participating Artists

  1. Sobia Ahmad explores the transcendental power of everyday experiences, objects, and rituals through film, photography, and social practice. She draws from non-western lexicons, specifically traditions of devotional poetry and oral storytelling associated with Sufism. Ahmad was born and raised in Pakistan and moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2024), a BS in Community Health (2015), and a BA in Studio Art (2016), both from the University of Maryland College Park, and lives in Pittsburgh.

  2. Clare Sheedy lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches art to children and works at a Downtown box office. In her work, Sheedy explores the tactile edges of perception and presence, incorporating photographs and braille to complicate boundaries between knowing and unknowing. Her work invites a shared attentiveness between viewer and artist, forming an intimacy through language, touch, and feeling. Sheedy’s processes are about surrendering to the act of imaginative extension, where senses and self both solidify and liquefy in the presence of the work.