As the title implies, there's a topsy-turvy up-and-down trajectory. C'est la Vie (That's life)! But Dato' Sharifah Fatimah offs a positive homily despite the struggles and setbacks, with the cluster of odd shapes oozing its own rhythms, simulating erratic movements. And what a brilliant choreography of bright luminescent colours, don't you think? The looser, free-wheeling strokes also reflect her involuntary emancipation from the shackles of 9-to-5 work regime when she quit as National Art Gallery curator in 1990. Interestingly, this was a time when Dato' Sharifah was enamoured with modelling clay, concocting her tactile Touch The Earth diversion after a memorable visit to the Petra formations in Jordan in 1990. It was also a time of her ruminative Meditation series. Dato' Sharifah Fatimah comes from a pioneering batch of female fine-art students from the Mara Institute of Technology, now a university. After graduating from ITM in 1971, she continued her art studies at the Reading University, England (BFA) and the Pratt Institute, New York (MFA). Her great awards include the Major Awards in the Salon Malaysia 1979 (jointly) and Young Contemporary Artists (Bakat Muda Sezaman, 1981). She also garnered the Minor Award in the Malaysian Landscape competition (1972), while internationally, she placed third in the Islamic World Painting Biennial in Teheran, Iran. She was a former curator at the National Art Gallery, from 1982-1989, and has not looked back since her first solo at the Alpha Gallery in Singapore in 1972. In 2006, she was conferred a Dato'ship by the Sultan of Kedah, the first female artist to have received the award on own merit. In 2014, she received the Women of Excellence Award Malaysia in the Arts, Culture and Entertainment category.