Syarifah Nadhirah (b.1993) is a Visual Artist, having recently served as Creative Director (under the Forest Conservation team) at Forest House. She is a recipient of the Chevening Awards 2025 and is currently writing her dissertation for her Master’s in Anthropology of Environment and Sustainability at SOAS, University of London (2025/2026), focusing on the precarity of food producers and farmers’ livelihoods in light of the Malaysian government’s proposed seed quality bill to join the UPOV1991.
Syarifah also catalogued and illustrated edible plants as seen through Orang Asli Semai and Temuan members of the community in her book, Recalling Forgotten Tastes. Her subsequent work explored ideas of memory and matter of plant migration, resulting in her solo exhibition, ‘Measure of Seeds’. Syarifah’s artistic and research practice speculates on the trajectories of our botanical landscapes through printmaking, material culture and archival art.
Working on these tangents, she has attended the Rimbun Dahan Southeast Asian Arts Residency, and more recently the Plants on Paper Residency by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and the Time of the Rivers Fellowship by British Council. Her artworks have been exhibited both locally and internationally in Thailand, and was invited to speak on international panels including On Biodiversity: History, Heritage, and Research in Asia at the National University of Singapore, Bangkok Literature Festival 2023 and Singapore Writers Festival 2024.
She is the recipient of the Krishen Jit Fund 2024 for her work, Roots and Ruins, the Visual Arts Showcase Funding Programme 2021 by Cultural Economy Development Agency (CENDANA) for her work on Measure of Seeds: Tracing Memory and Matter of Plant Migration, the Pardicolor Creative Arts Fund 2021 by Wildlife Asia for Mapping Indigeneity through Memory of Tastes and the INXO Arts Fund 2019 Grant by INXO Arts Foundation for her publication of Recalling Forgotten Tastes. Some of her artworks are collected by Rimbun Dahan and Jim Thompson Foundation.
She has also endevoured into running her own co-founded design studio Paperweight Studio.