The ‘clean artist’ balancing her art and pharmacy careers

Pharmacist Saba Rifat has spent a decade pursuing two careers she loves. From Monday to Wednesday, she’s an acute medicine clinical pharmacist working at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield.
But from Thursday to Friday, she is busy hustling as an artist juggling projects and commissions as she forges a name for herself in the art world.
Rifat just completed a geometric mural at a research space in the hospital where she works. Her brief was 'to create an artwork which celebrates innovation and inspires people who come in to use the space’.
Read more: Artist pharmacist creates geometric hospital mural
“I really enjoy public space art so people can immerse themselves in a room, with a sculpture, a mural,” she says. “So, with murals and three-dimensional sculptural pieces, I'm very much drawn to those commissions or opportunities.”
In 2022, Rifat created another local piece in a Dewsbury underpass, called Tessella.

Referencing the brickwork, paving, and stain glass windows in the town centre, she engaged with local college students and the public to develop her idea, which eventually saw 3,000 mosaic tiles installed for pedestrians walking through the underpass.
“When I get approached to do commissions, a lot of it is with public engagement and that is rewarding,” she says. “It probably echoes me being a pharmacist, because I enjoy speaking to patients, enjoy resolving any issues and helping.”
Geometric influences
Rifat started out in pharmacy and says with her Asian background, she was “encouraged” into sciences but was “always very crafty and artsy as a child”.
Shortly after qualifying as a pharmacist, she completed a postgraduate course in Islamic and traditional art in London in 2001.
While Rifat’s cultural heritage partly influenced the choice of her postgraduate course, she was also drawn to “sacred geometry in all traditions and religions” and understanding the “endless possibilities” of using triangles, squares, circles and hexagon shapes in art.
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“You are taught formally to use a compass, ruler and pencil to draw a complex geometric pattern that you might find in a mosque in Turkey or Morocco. But as much as I like the traditional, strict, rigid rules of it, I'm trying to be a bit more playful and bring it into more abstract and a bit of my own self into it.”
Rifat has done a range of projects over her career using geometry and historical Islamic patterns in her art, and the photography on her website shows how shapes inspire her approach.
Outside of the UK, she’s had installations exhibited in Malayasia, and in 2018 she travelled to Abu Dhabi to build a polyhedral sculpture at the city’s Louvre Museum, as well as running a paper Zillij mosaic workshop in Fez, Morocco.

“I do what I love”
But back home in her studio space at West Yorkshire Print Workshop, she says it’s “nice to belong to an artist community” where she offers workshops in screen printing and uses a gallery space with other artists residing there too.
While she feels she sometimes works “in a robotic fashion” in pharmacy and is “a bit more sentimental” in art, she loves working in both areas.
“There’s nothing wrong with having two careers. I’d love to be doing art full-time, but it depends when commissions come. The balance at the moment works really well for me. I’ve had such a busy couple of years and last year was manic!”
She says “being a pharmacist you want things done a certain way” and is perhaps why her studio space looks a little different to her peers.
“The table I work on in completely white and empty, it’s a clean space for me to think. I’m a bit of a clean artist because when I’m making, I create a mess, but I have to have a clean table and everything clean and organised before I start, and at the end I have a good clean out.”
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Rifat still finds the time to expand her pharmacy knowledge as three years ago, she got her prescriber qualification. But looking ahead, she’s excited about an outdoor mural commission due to be completed in June in the Yorkshire area after being on the end of a few rejections for other projects she applied to in the last year.
“It’s very competitive, so it’s picking yourself up from that. You have to do what you can, apply for lots, but have to just keep going.
“I just want to do what I love and if something comes of it, great! If not, thankfully I’ve balanced it with another career, and I still work hard.”
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