One of the first women artists to graduate from Khartoum’s College of Fine and Applied Art in 1963, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag is a pioneering artist who co-founded the conceptual Crystalist Group in the mid-1970s. Between 1964 and 1966, she studied mural painting at the Royal College of Art, London, and after her return to Sudan in 1966, she spent three decades as a tenured professor in the painting department of her Khartoum alma mater. Drawing inspiration from nature and Sudanese Zar rituals, Ishag’s drawings and paintings often feature distorted faces and figures of women, mostly rendered in dark monochromic tones of brown and other muted colours. Ishag paints on a variety of surfaces, such as screens, leather drums and calabashes—vessels made from hollowed-out dried shells of the bottle gourd. Holding deep cultural resonance in Sudan, a calabash is a vessel of domesticity, labour and resilience. Composition, a series of paintings created on different materials, includes three calabashes, traditionally used by nomadic tribes as a container to carry water and other essentials. On these calabashes, Ishag depicts figures that recur in her work—women in a screaming state, caught in a trance-like moment, or women in a serene pose, their fissured heads intertwined with roots and leaves. By painting women's bodies on the outer surface of these containers, Ishag is challenging the notion of containment: she renders the women visible, powerful and spiritually transcendent, presenting their interior worlds on the outside.