SAUD BALOCH
Biography
I am an artist born in Nushki, Balochistan, Pakistan, and based in the United Kingdom. My practice explores how bodies, materials and landscapes carry the traces of political, environmental and social pressures over time. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, sound and artists' moving image, I investigate how lived experience becomes embedded in matter through sustained acts of making, observation and material enquiry.
I studied Fine Art at the University of Balochistan before completing a BFA with Distinction at the National College of Arts, Lahore, and an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (2025). My work has been exhibited internationally, including at Sanat Gallery, Karachi, and Hartlepool Art Gallery, and is held in the collection of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA). I have received support from organisations including Arts Council England and BALTIC, and have exhibited regularly in the UK and Pakistan since 2016.
Artist Statement
My practice explores how bodies, materials and landscapes carry the traces of political, environmental and social pressures over time. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, sound and artists' moving image, I investigate how lived experience becomes embedded in matter and how sustained acts of making, observation and material enquiry can reveal overlooked histories.
Rooted in my experience of growing up in Nushki, Balochistan, Pakistan, and informed by living and working in the United Kingdom since 2016, my work considers landscape not as a backdrop but as an active witness to memory, power and transformation. Rather than representing events directly, I am interested in how their effects accumulate through bodies, places and materials, revealing relationships between people, landscape and systems of control.
Making is central to the way I think. Time, labour and experimentation are integral to my process, allowing meaning to emerge through sustained engagement with materials. Whether working with clay, stone, steel, industrial slag, drawing, sound or artists' moving image, I treat material processes as a way of thinking rather than a means of representation alone.
My recent work has expanded into immersive installations that bring together sculpture, sound, and artists' moving image to create spaces for reflection on memory, absence, and the enduring relationship between body, place, and power. Rather than offering fixed narratives, I aim to create works that invite slow looking and sustained engagement with the material afterlives of political, environmental and social change.
CV
EDUCATION
2025 | Master of Arts in Sculpture | Royal College of Art (RCA), London, UK
Degree Show: Confined Narratives, RCA (June 2025)
2013 | National College of Arts (NCA) | Lahore, Pakistan
Degree Show, Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, NCA
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 | Nowhere to Land | Pineapple Black, Middlesbrough, UK
2018 | Fool’s Gold | Sanat Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
2017 | Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt | Hartlepool Art Gallery, UK
2016 | Under the Dust | Sanat Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023 | Moment in Time | The Upside Space, India (Online)
2023 | Middlesbrough Art Weekender | Navigator North, Middlesbrough, UK
2021 | MIMA Collection | Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), UK
2018 | The Perfect Gentlemen | Project Art Divvy & Rossi & Rossi, London, UK
2018 | I, Too, Am a Part of this History | Fakir Khana Museum / Lahore Biennale, Pakistan
2014 | Anomalous | Sanat Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
RESIDENCIES & AWARDS
2021 | Kooshk Residency | Tehran, Iran (Awarded; postponed due to closure)
2020 | Creative Space Residency | BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK
2016 | Emerging Artists’ Bursary | Stellar Projects / Navigator North, Middlesbrough, UK
2014 | Artist Residency | Sanat Initiative, Karachi, Pakistan
PROFESSIONAL ENGAGEMENT
Talks & Research
2023 | Participant, AHRC-funded Research Network Towards a Socio-Somatic History of the Troubles | Teesside
University, Belfast & Bogside Museums, UK
2023 | Participant, BA/Leverhulme Project Desert Disorders | Northumbria University, UK
Teaching & Jury
2023 | Juror, MA Visual Arts | National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan
2014 – 2016 | Visiting Lecturer in Sculpture | National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan
2018 – 2023 | Life Drawing Instructor | Various institutions (Hartlepool, Saabat, Base Camp, Navigator North), UK
Community Engagement
2017 | Facilitator, Building Bridges Creative Writing Workshop | Hartlepool Art Gallery, UK
COLLECTIONS
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), UK
