Shafina Jaffer is an African artist who has completed her Graduate Diploma in Art & Design & Masters in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Additionally, she has been trained at Ruskin School of Art, Slade School of Art and The Prince’s Foundation of Traditional Arts, United Kingdom. She has lived in multiple countries across different continents and is currently residing in Tanzania. Her works have been featured in several international exhibitions and publications. More recently her painting, Take Me Away, was selected to be shown at the Coronation Concert of their Majesties King Charles III & Queen Camilla at Windsor Castle.
In her view, the current landscape of ‘spiritual’ art is shaped by interpretations primarily derived from a religious lens. Her goal is to move away from such interpretations that fall under a religious aegis, aiming instead to intermingle scientific, philosophical and nature themes with the spiritual. In a maxim: she fosters an appreciation of spiritual art through thematic expressions that are a blend of scientific, philosophical or naturalistic reason — not religious nor esoteric reason.
Furthermore, as an artist whom aims to provoke critical interpretations of her art from spectators she leverages the concept of archetypes and mono-myth. In that, across civilisation - as well as across a globalised monoculture - there exists, and persists, social and cultural themes upon which she capitalise on. These archetypes being ones that pertain to: gender, feminism, the identity of the ‘self’ and divinity.
In the future, Shafina aims to further explore the human anatomy, its relationship to spirituality and nature, whilst also embedding techniques of African art with modern art.
