Hormazd Narielwalla began his professional life in the cutting room of Dege & Skinner, a Savile Row tailor. Here he found inspiration for his subsequent artistic career in the brown paper patterns with their dense palimpsests of overlapping lines and annotations which comprise a kind of code for describing and analysing the shape of a human body, and each completely individual. Later he worked with historical domestic dressmaking patterns which for economy often layered the life-sized templates of entire garments on a single sheet of paper. Each facet of the garment is encoded in web of dots, lines and numbers. Like Cubist representations of vases or bodies these patterns use flat unfolded forms to describe volume. Narielwalla was one of the selected artists at the 2016 International Print Biennale in Newcastle and was the winner of the Paupers Press Prize through which he was given the opportunity to make new work at the Paupers Press London print workshop. These two lithographs were the result.

In this pair of lithographs Narielwalla draws together diverse cultural influences to celebrate the body and consider its representation through a broad span of art history. For The Mesopotamian Maze he looked at an ancient terracotta figure in the British Museum collections, sculpted by an unknown hand. He translates the voluptuous forms of this prehistoric fertility goddess into an abstract code derived from 1950s dress patterns, creating layered templates for describing the female body. At the same time, he references Cubism, and Picasso’s curvaceous but fragmented imagery of the female body. The ‘Maze’ of the title refers in part to Narielwalla’s experience of navigating museum collections, finding a productive path that connects or finds inspiration in different cultures and artefacts from different times and places. His selective addition of colour refers not only to his broader artistic practice, in which he often makes collages from cut-out pieces of coloured papers, but also to the way the dress pattern would have been translated by the dressmaker into a finished article pieced together from coloured fabrics.