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Art of Life Shenaz Hanslot is an artist and she’s certainly a fighter. She’s fought family and social prejudices to become an artist. Her belief in her vocation has sustained her through a life-time of ill health. Shenaz was born with a rare condition which means her skeleton has never developed fully - she is now 38 and is four foot in height - and she has had problems with her kidneys from an early age. Her doctors tell her now that without dialysis she has only a few months to live. But she questions what life on dialysis would be like. For Sehnaz, living is living your dream. Sehnaz's childhood was spent in Zambia as a member of a devoutly Muslim family. Her illness, a deficiency of calcium in the bones and amino acids meant she developed problems walking and with her kidneys. With each operation she had to learn to walk again and again, "I’d say to myself, 'Get up and move your legs Sehnaz! It’s the only way you’re going to get out there!"
Before she even knew what the word meant, art had become important to Sehnaz, "It was a gradual realisation. I just did this thing - for me it came fairly naturally. I was discouraged from the start, but it was something which took me away from the discipline and strictness of my surroundings at that time."
Sehnaz's family, her father more than anyone, believed that because she was so small, this was a calling to dedicate her life to God, in Islam. Her normal schoolwork was supplemented by Islamic schooling, leaving her little time to be just a child.
At eight years old, for medical and educational reasons, she came to Britain on her own to live with a married sister in Leicester. As time went on she increasingly felt that there was nowhere that she really belonged. But Sehnaz had always been the independent type and as a teenager she realised that life for her was not going to be easy, "I was aware that I was going to have a problem with the way people saw me," she says, "I could never be whatever people wanted me to be." More  | |
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