About

Portrait of Aphra Shemza at light art exhibition at Wolverhampton art gallery

About Aphra Shemza

Aphra Shemza is a UK based multimedia artist with over a decade of experience working in the arts. She creates interactive sculpture and installations for private collectors and public institutions and exhibits her work around the globe.

Inspired by her grandfather, the well-known abstract painter Anwar Jalal Shemza, her work explores her Islamic cultural heritage, sustainable practice and creating art for all. As an artist and activist, Shemza finds ambitious ways to fuse methodologies from the past with new innovations in technology to imagine what the role of art could be in the future.

Aphra Shemza in the studio working on her sustainable art project

Shemza combines abstraction with traditional sculpting techniques and technology to create her work. As a sculptor her main medium is light, which she manipulates to create works that change over time. Handmade and bespoke interactive circuits are embedded within the pieces and this creates work which responds to the viewer or the space around it. Just as abstraction was said to be a ‘universal language for the masses’, Shemza has created a new visual language for a contemporary audience - one that explores the impact and legacy of technology on our world.

Shemza works in series. Each series has a different thematic exploration and a different aesthetic quality. From migration to climate change, Shemza explores many themes and ideas within her work and advocates for a sustainable practice. She uses her art-making as a tool to explore key concepts which are central to her individual journey through life.

Shemza’s mission is to make art accessible to all which she does through her workshops, talks and participatory art projects.

She is a resident at Somerset House Exchange and Director of the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza. Between 2012-2022 Shemza co-founded and was Director of Art in Flux CIC. 

My Partners

Selected Documentaries

Mini documentary

2.58mins

Documentary about my art practice featuring information about how I create my artworks.

shemza.digital documentary

12mins

Documentary about the shemza.digital project, based on my grandfather’s (Anwar Jalal Shemza) work. The project was created for and with the British public.

Ocean Rise documentary

6.58mins

Documentary about the Ocean Rise project in the UK where I was artist is residence at SPACER and upscaled my plastic recycling capabilities.