mohini kaur

Artist Statement

Mohini Kaur engages painting as an inquiry into transcendence. Drawing from her Indian heritage, she sees her access to Source as embodied traces of inner knowings. Led by somatic intuition, trusting the wisdom and memory of her body is essential to her practice.

She often paints directly with her hands, allowing them to lead the way. Engaging with primal knowledge systems, she pours, stains and embeds inherited materials such as kumkum, silk and sacred ash into her work. Traditionally used in ritual contexts, Kaur understands these materials as holding their own vital transformative energy. In this way, both material and process become agents on the path of spiritual awakening.

Through uninhibited movement and gesture, Kaur allows her feminine force (Shakti) to express itself how it wants to come through, spilling across large scale 10 metre rolls of canvas. Allowing space to the female body is essential to her practice, not only as subject but as a method that makes room for cycles of tension, release and renewal. Through painting, she attends to the pull between the maternal and the destructive, nurture and abandon and the delicate and the grotesque. These forces are not resolved, but held in relation, shaping a practice that allows contradiction to exist as a part of fully lived divine feminine experience.

Reflecting on her relationship to spirituality, her practice is in conversation with ancestral knowledge, postcolonial theories and hydro-feminist ways of thinking. As an artist that moves between mediums which include photography and other material processes, Mohini uses a framework to hold the breadth of her artistic inquiry which she calls “The Long Ancestral Body”. This framework is a way of seeing the self as extended across generations and landscapes. Through this lens, her work reflects on the cyclical nature of time, and the possibility of remembering oneself as part of a larger interconnected ecological and ancestral continuum.