Shakila has devoted over two decades to tearing and pasting paper in order to create sensitive andpowerful visual reflections on humanity. To classify her as a 'Post-Modernist' would be indulging merely in an act of formal definition. She is an artist whose work has now moved beyond labels. Her art emerges from the basic human desire to build and communicate. The simple act of tearing paper by hand (there is no preliminary drawing or knife used) lends a physical immediacy to both the small and the sculptural pieces. Her earlier work had a more bucolic and narrative element, showing people in pastoral landscapes and as part of village scenes. Her people were placed not only in nature but also in a state of simplicity. There was also wit and humour, two aspects not in evidence so often in her current body of work. Shakila's work has increasingly become larger in scale, sculptural, more abstract. It is also noticeably darker, placing its subject in larger contexts. Her raw material is paper torn out of magazines. That becomes another means of infusing her pieces with social and art-historical matter. Form and content have thus become critical to her creative process. With her large installation pieces, Shakila is making something more permanent and substantial, and more serious, out of paper, a medium that is usually not associated with these qualities. Shakila brings a competitive edge to her use of collage which defies and tears the art conventions.