Jai Chuhan   

The pandemic has been a worry and curtailment, but also productive in my studio, with mutual support from other artists, friends and family. As a mother I am long past the ’baby’ stage of caring, but caring is ongoing, with increased inter-generational caring. I have continued to make paintings exploring motherhood. 

For example, Nocturne 2021 presents a woman balanced on a kind of plinth in a room, gazing at or dreaming of a landscape and of memories including of a baby, contemplating her situation, with mystery contained in the deep colours and materiality of painted marks. I paint figures in ambiguous interior spaces with areas suggesting windows or mirrors, the images function as arenas for exploring the female gaze and how postures and facial expressions reflect a sense of home and ‘unhome’, and symbioses of male and female. The poses are still or in flowing movement, in focus or blurrily glimpsed, exposed as if in privacy or on show, with the conscious and the sub-conscious mind a place of refuge or confinement. The materiality of paint and colour create a mood of reverie, veiling yet revealing conflicts and desires, challenging tropes of exploitation, celebration, the gaze, eroticism and race, with the figures operating as protagonists or recipients in cultural settings.