Syarifah Nadhirah (b.1993) is an architect by practice, a Visual Artist, and currently serves as Creative Director (under the Forest Conservation team) at Forest House. Syarifah’s work focuses on cataloguing Malaysia’s edible plants in her book, Recalling Forgotten Tastes. Her most recent work explores ideas of memory and matter of plant migration, resulting in her solo exhibition, ‘Measure of Seeds’. Syarifah’s artistic and research practice speculates on the trajectories of our botanical landscapes through printmaking, material culture and archival art. Her body of work cross-pollinates art with ecological relationships, exploring the role of tacit knowledge in decentralising narratives around plants, seed guardianship and food security in relation to the changing landscapes of the environment.
Working on these tangents, she has attended the Rimbun Dahan Southeast Asian Arts Residency, and more recently the Plants on Paper Residency by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, exhibited her artworks both locally and internationally in Thailand, and was invited to speak on international panels including On Biodiversity: History, Heritage, and Research in Asia at the National University of Singapore, Bangkok Literature Festival 2023 and Singapore Writers Festival 2024.
She is the recipient of the Krishen Jit Fund 2024 for her upcoming work, Roots and Ruins, the Visual Arts Showcase Funding Programme 2021 by Cultural Economy Development Agency (CENDANA) for her work on Measure of Seeds : Tracing Memory and Matter of Plant Migration, the Pardicolor Creative Arts Fund 2021 by Wildlife Asia for Mapping Indigeneity through Memory of Tastes and the INXO Arts Fund 2019 Grant by INXO Arts Foundation for her publication of Recalling Forgotten Tastes. Some of her artworks are collected by Rimbun Dahan and Jim Thompson Foundation.
She has also endevoured into running her own co-founded design studio Paperweight Studio.