As Instagram-famed Sara Shakeel brings her bejewelled installation The Great Supper back to Greenwich’s NOW Gallery, where it was originally shown in 2019, Holly O’Mahony speaks to the Pakistani-born collage artist about seeing beauty in everyday objects and finding her calling through social media.
What constitutes a successful artist? Back in the day, by which I mean any era that preceded the birth of the internet, ‘success’ might have been used to describe a slim number of professionals who had graduated from a slim number of prestigious institutions and had their work exhibited at a slim number of esteemed galleries, or bought by wealthy patrons. Today, thanks in part to the rise of self-publishing via social media platforms, there are many more ways of finding an audience and more metrics – such as likes and follows – for defining success.
Artist Sara Shakeel, who in her own words “got famous by superimposing crystals on images, which had never been done before”, and posting these on Instagram, didn’t arrive in the art world via a conventional path. As a result, “not a lot of people who sit on the top consider me an artist… they wonder what I can know about art.”
Sara Shakeel’s The Great Supper returns to NOW Gallery. Photo credit: Charles Emerson
With over a million followers and images that have been shared and admired around the world – including by Kendall Jenner, Craig David and other famous faces, she must be doing something right.
We speak over Zoom, where I find Sara in her London studio surrounded by glittering props for future installations, including an upcoming exhibition in Paris. She’s warm, easy-going and happy to share her story. A known name for several years now, she still seems gratefully excited to have found success through “playing with images”.
Born and raised in Pakistan to a middle class family who prioritised education, Sara first trained as a dentist. “I was in an institution which was in a rural part of the country. Women were not allowed to be outspoken,” she recalls. “I’m not a rebel but I like to point a finger at what’s wrong.” Sara’s principal didn’t like her “guts”, though, and threatened to fail her for speaking up. So she quit, one paper away from being a qualified dentist.
It was during this period, back home with her parents and shutting herself away from the world while she recouped, that Sara, armed only with a smartphone, downloaded an art app “out of curiosity” and started blending images. She found the experience of putting different pictures together to make digital artworks therapeutic. “I knew what collage art was. I liked Picasso and wanted to know more about him,” she remembers, explaining that it was he who coined the term ‘collage art’ for works that saw images or materials stuck on a supporting surface, thereby creating a new image.
Sara Shakeel’s The Great Supper. Photo credit: Charles Emerson
“I had no idea what copyrights were,” she admits with a tone of fond affection for her younger, more naive self. “I had no links in media or the art world. I didn’t know what Tate Modern was or the V&A,” she adds, pointing out that while she had access to western literature, TV shows and later the internet, she rarely travelled internationally back then.
It was 2016 when Sara first experienced a taste of what felt like recognition. “I got 23 likes [on Instagram] on one picture and felt like I’d made it,” laughs the artist who, seven years on, posts pictures that regularly clock up tens of thousands of likes.
She credits NOW Gallery curator Kaia Charles for facilitating her transition from digital to installation artist. “Kaia really believed in me. I had no experience creating any sculpture or anything but she believed in my vision,” she recalls. It was an ambitious vision, to create a physical version of one of her sparkling images, and there were questions at first as to whether it would even be possible.
Sara with the help of Kaia landed on The Great Supper, a piece inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting The Last Supper, that consisted of a large dining table and six chairs all decorated in shimmering chain crystals. “I had a team of five art technicians and I showed them how to do it. It was a long process; it took a month.”
Her training in dentistry helped. “Dentists know how to sculpt. You need to be very precise with the face structure, the teeth, alignment… it’s art,” she muses.
The Great Supper originally ran at NOW Gallery in 2019, and it was off the back of this that the commissions started coming in. Sara was asked by Chance the Rapper to design him a bejewelled album cover, and by the London-based retailer Browns to mount The Great Supper in their store.
Sara moved to London from Pakistan two-and-a-half years ago. “When I came to this part of the world which I’d seen through the TV, it was like I was on acid,” she laughs. “I saw the beauty in everything, including the tube, which not a lot of people in the UK see. I come from a country where things as basic as transport are difficult and expensive, it’s so hard to get from one place to another,” she reasons. A glitter-coated picture of a tube carriage is one of the artist’s recurring pictures on Instagram.
Sara Shakeel’s The Great Supper. Photo credit: Charles Emerson
Today, Sara, who calls herself an ‘artrepreneur’, has over 3,000 digital artworks to her name. While rights to some images have become harder to obtain now she’s a known artist, she now has a lawyer who manages the copyright side of her business, and often takes her own pictures or commissions photographers to take them for her. “I have to play fair because a lot of artists look up to me now,” she says, adding that she’s also been on the flipside of this, having her own works stolen.
If you don’t follow Sara on Instagram, chances are you will have seen some of her most famous images capturing a zeitgeist, such as a pair of hands being washed in sparkly water during the Covid-19 pandemic. Glittery kittens, tongues and footballers are all recurring themes too.
While her images have been viewed the world over, Sara insists she’s “excited and humbled” to be bringing The Great Supper back to NOW Gallery as part of Greenwich Peninsula’s District for London Design Festival 2023. Her mother was her only family member who got to see it last time, so she’s looking forward to being able to share it with her brother, who is studying at Oxford University, as well as her husband and two-year-old daughter.
Does she feel bitter, ever, looking back on the treatment she received while training to be a dentist? “I like to see the positive in everything, life is too short to be negative,” she insists. Would she ever consider returning to the world of teeth, drills and scalpels one day? “I think of it every day. I love dentistry and if I ever come to a point where I’m satisfied with what I’ve done [in the art sphere] I might pursue and do dentistry out of love and maybe help people to take their pain away.” She’s in no rush, though. “I’ll wait for the right time and it will happen at the right time,” she says, with a happy-go-lucky shrug and a smile.
The Great Supper is on show at NOW Gallery, Soames Walk, London SE10 0SQ.
September 16 – October 15, Friday – Sunday, 10am – 4pm.
Admission: FREE, but booking required.
