Innah has lived in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal for most of her life and is currently based there. She uses acrylics and mixed media to create surrealistic, otherworldly dreamscapes. She graduated from Dawson College and Concordia University in Studio Arts, earning a BFA with distinction. At Concordia she specialized in painting, lithography, and interactive installations. She has participated in exhibitions at galleries like ARPRIM and with the Federation of Canadian Artists, as well as shows in private venues and pop-up shows in NDG. She is passionate about community engagement and has volunteered at Quebec Public Research Group (QPIRG) and as a peer support worker at Concordia. She loves playing guitar and singing and is also studying to become a counsellor. For her portfolio, visit innah.art.

The main themes that my art explores across the disciplines of printmaking, painting, and sculpture include the magical potential and quiet isolation of vast spaces from deserts to outer space, which reflect a yearning to escape from the struggles of chronic illness and loneliness. My art also explores the divine design behind the beauty and diversity of nature and how technological innovations and art-making can be ways to co-create with God and reassert one’s agency in the face of adversity.

My early work often features mechanical gears as a symbol of technological innovations changing our relationship to nature, a theme that I frequently return to in my art through juxtaposition of nature and technology. Associated with the Victorian age and industrialization, gears represent the beginning of modern technology from steam engines to rocket engines. They are distorted in my artworks as if they’re alive: both beneficial and harmful as technology has increased humanity’s creative and destructive capabilities.

Inspired by my physicist father’s passion for space, I often paint with layers of acrylics on raw canvas to depict the expanse of nebulae, the birthplace of stars, with a diffuse, dreamy, watercolour effect. I highlight the surreal, fantastical, and frenetic quality of galaxies by using vibrant, saturated glazes. While these dreamscapes are full of hope and possibility, space also holds vast, uninhabited, unfathomable emptiness. Living with chronic illness, I paint as a way to escape and dream, to depict my loneliness as a misfit trying to understand herself. Painting, and art-making as a whole, has a therapeutic effect as it helps me to reassert my role as an active creator, bringing me closer to the divine. 

Recently, an interest in depth and texture has prompted me to incorporate sculpture to create 3D, mixed-media paintings. Seeking to activate the sense of touch and increase audience interactivity, I have been experimenting with various substances like salt and hot glue to create different textures and structures and sculpting air-dry clay on wood panels. The trial-and-error process of making 3D paintings has been a challenging but exciting new way for me to interpret the themes that I have been passionately exploring throughout my art practice.