mohini kaur

Artist Statement

Mohini Kaur’s work begins in sensation, where knowledge is received through touch and movement. Through painting, she explores how experiences of transcendence are encountered and resisted in the body. 

She paints directly with her hands, using somatic awareness to guide the work. Engaging with ancient Indian knowledge systems, she pours and embeds inherited materials such as kumkum, silk and sacred ash into her work. Kumkum gathers and thickens, at times clotted and excessive, resisting predictability. Ash settles into the surface, grounding it, while silk absorbs and disperses pigment fluidly. For Kaur, this material aliveness re-situates ritual within a different set of conditions, shifting how it is met. Material and process become part of a lived spiritual inquiry. 

Through expansive movement, Kaur activates her feminine force (Shakti), extending her gestures across 10 metre rolls of canvas. She creates space for the female body not only as subject but as method, making room for cycles of tension, release and renewal. The work does not move away from intensity or excess, but presses further into them. In painting, she attends to the pull between the maternal and the destructive, between nurture and abandon, and the delicate and the grotesque. These forces are held in relation, shaping a practice that allows contradiction to exist as part of a fully lived experience of feminine embodiment. 

Working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography and material processes, Kaur approaches her practice through a framework she calls The Long Ancestral Body. Here, the work situates the self within a larger ecological and ancestral continuum, where these relations remain alive. The body becomes a place where what lies beyond it is encountered, held in tension and never fully contained.