Here’s our latest Q&A with the effervescent 24-year-old illustrator and journalist, Hana Shafi. She’s a Toronto-based badass whose Instagram is making ripples across the Internet with her art focused on affirmations and cultivating empathy. Read on, and then go follow her.
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Tell me a little about who you are and where you’re from?
I’m a freelance artist and writer living in Toronto. Funnily enough, I didn’t study art. I went to university for journalism and graduated in 2015.
I’m Indo-Persian—I come from a family with a really diverse background, a lot of countries in the mix from South Asia and the Middle East. I immigrated to Mississauga, Ontario with my family in 1996.
What or who inspires you?
There is such a vast plethora of things that have inspired me as an artist. Everything from Frida Kahlo’s surreal self-portraits to current contemporary artists like Polly Nor have influenced my artistic practice. Soft self-care aesthetics that celebrate vulnerability and reclamations of “femininity” are a huge aspect of my affirmation work. Outside of my affirmation work, I’ve very much been influenced by underground comics, grunge music, explorations of body image, etc.
I really want people to feel validated about their anger, their sadness, their struggle. A lot of positivity rhetoric you see online comes from a very privileged perspective. It often tells people to just grin and bear it and I think that approach lacks cultural competency and basic empathy. So I’m trying to employ a more understanding and empathetic perspective in my work so that if a person is struggling, if they’re relapsing, if they’re having trouble knowing their self-worth, that I’m not making that person feel worse about those things, or shaming them in any way.
Advice on how to make social progress?
Social progress starts with small actions first and then blooms into bigger things. So I like to remind people that social progress starts with your immediate social circle. How are you working to understand the experiences of your friends? How do you treat people around you who are different from you? Do you take the time to listen to their stories or do you talk over them? What do you say when you hear people say problematic things? You have to take those little steps first and make an impact on the people around you.
Pick a favorite piece and give us a little backstory on it.
It’s so hard to pick a favorite piece. There have been over 100 affirmations. I do really appreciate the one about being gentle with yourself where I drew an image of a person putting flowers in their hair. I’m often very hard on myself so I like to keep that one close as a reminder. I drew one of three cats about how you can surround yourself with people who make you feel good. For that one, I needed reference photos of cats and I put a Facebook status up and got flooded with pictures from friends of their cute cats. I loved that. It’s also fun when art feels collaborative like that.
When you’re not making art, what are you doing?
I do a lot of non-fiction narrative writing. I also very much enjoy creative writing, and poetry has been a passion of mine since the fifth grade—I used to write really corny embarrassing stuff. Or, I’m watching Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.
[This interview has been condensed.]
