Hello
Hi, I'm Misbah Wolf
I am a creative witch-------I am a gothic storyteller, a mystic, a poet, musician, artist, researcher, photographer, and web designer. My work is informed by gnostic philosophies, by the Sufis, by reverence for this complex and beautiful world and seeks to transcend, to connect, to offer up beauty, delight, meditations, and enquiry.
I believe that every sound and image is a voice or a text from beyond--from the place of the dead, from the elsewhere, from another realm. It was once in the now, but its fate is to pass into a time capsule--a canopic jar--a photo, a sound bite. Creativite expression is a confluence, a re-organising principle of time, space and dimensions, where a convergence of the "new of now"erupts with the ghosts of old. Art is awake and fully present and hopefully will transcend the artist. I am the muse, I am the medium for the vision of worlds converging--of time-lines intersecting, of dimensions communicating.
Current invocations
Book of Shadows
Creative Victoria Supported
This project is an exploration of spiritual/esoteric/pagan/primary texts and responding and evolving them into creative work, namely a book that is part 'auto-mythological and magic realism', a series of musical recordings, and images. What is shown here are the influences, ideas and stories that are forming part of my manuscript 'The Book of Shadows' This book will be a full length fiction book.
Sound
soundscapes collection
My work is intimately bonded and evolving through sound, from storytelling, to singing, to experimental sounds, which take listeners on a fully embodied and intimate experience of my imaginings.
Vision
Third Eye Visions
My creative process is also connected to visual aesthetics. The visuals express the tensions and limits where words cannot go...
Publications
Places, both print, on-line, and IRL where I have shared my work/ currently sharing my work
Confess
entries into my thoughts
This is a collection of my writing that is eclectic, diasporic, and without genre
My second book 2022
published by Vagabond Press
Carapace takes for its title an extension of the idea of shelter, protection and home and attempts to crack the outer shell of language to reveal the vulnerability of language forms, relationships, and safety. It archives the journey of a young girl towards developing, losing, and leaving relationships within share-houses. This book is a follow on from Rooftops in Karachi, where the young girl has left her family home in Australia to begin at the age of 15 to navigate the world of relationships within the boundaries of temporary share-housing. Further responding to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is the conviction that there are traceable transcendent possibilities of personal poetic phenomenology within the realm of the house.
Short stories
tall tales, deep wellls, adventures on trams, adventures into ghost lands, the consciousness in hands--these works are a collection of short stories--some of which have been published and some of which are biding their time.
carapace
Rooftops in Karachi
This was my first collection of poetry 2018
published by Vagabond Press
Highly commended in the Shapcott Poetry awards and critically acclaimed.
Behind my eyes are the eyes of a horse looking out’. In this dynamic collection of prose poems, Misbah spins a bright new compass over fragmented, improvised worlds. Her poetry scopes the aftershocks of imperialism and voices wild new visions, bringing us to the territory behind the eyes. With what James Baldwin called ‘perception at the pitch of passion’, Misbah's poems stun with their sudden intensities, their casual intimacies, their mapping of psychic expansions out of place. Their vocal resonance is emotionally protean—tones move swiftly from cool doom to playful grace—expressing the pleasures of observation and the strange consolations of unbelonging. —Lucy Van
While this is not the cover of the book, it is a photo of my ancestors on our farm near Karachi--I think this photo has hints of the ineffable..exquisitely caught.
Videos
Music videos and performances
I am developing a body of work using cut-up films from free archives and also performances set to my music.