Brushstrokes of Resilience: Reflections from Visiting Artist Karimah Hassan

As we approach the end of Wellbeing Month, of which this initiative was a part, we would like to share a short blog written by Karimah, after her visit to Marymount International School London:

How did we end up here?

I was flicking through the style magazine the other day and stopped at the final line of the editor’s note. Hanya Yanagihara wrote that a great artist must describe what it means to be alive in language fully their own.

Most people I meet now know me as a painter, fewer know that I spent seven years training as an architect. I loved the study of it and the grit. Architecture asks you to think at the scale of cities and centuries. But the practice felt restrictive. While I was drifting between fine art and buildings, I started experimenting with graffiti. At first, it was quietly done, and soon after, it became murals. Murals felt like a form of architecture that could happen quickly, and a form of art that denied elitism.

Then I stopped making murals for a while. Like many artists, I found myself pulled toward the evolution of other projects. Recently, a girls’ school invited me back to the wall. They asked if I would design a mural with their students around a single theme: resilience. I wondered what that word meant to them, so before I arrived, I sent a small homework prompt asking for their thoughts.

The responses were unexpectedly poetic. One girl wrote about a phoenix rising from ash. Another described shoots growing through cracks in concrete. Others spoke about gardens blooming in places where they should not survive. Reading them you could sense the pressures beneath the metaphors. Exams, expectations, social media, beauty standards, the quiet feeling of needing to prove yourself.

When I arrived at the school we drew the design together and began painting. Over two days the wall slowly filled with colour. Students came and went with brushes in their hands. Music played. Friends passing through the corridor stopped to watch and ask questions. Painting became its own small badge of pride.

What surprised me most was how natural it felt to step back and let the students decide where certain colours should go. I was guiding but not controlling. At times it felt less like teaching and more like an older sister standing nearby while something collective took shape. I remembered how important art had been to me when I was their age. Even as a teenager it gave me a place to exist without explanation.

At one point I asked the girls why resilience felt so necessary now. They spoke about pressure. Pressure to perform well in school. Pressure to present themselves in a certain way online. Pressure to make others happy. Listening to them I realised that every generation has its own version of this weight. The details change but the feeling does not.

By the end of the second day the mural belonged as much to them as it did to me. Watching them step back and photograph the finished wall I thought again about that sentence I had read earlier in the week. Perhaps describing what it means to be alive does not always happen in language. Sometimes it happens in colour on a wall, with a group of teenagers discovering that making something together is its own form of resilience.

Find Karimah’s full blog post here.