We are delighted to announce Mohini Kaur as OmVed Gardens' Artist of the Month for November. Kaur is a London-based artist working across painting, installation, sculpture and photography. Her work explores how transcendence is felt and resisted in the body within a framework she calls The Long Ancestral Body, situating the self within an ecological and ancestral continuum.
"The framework behind my practice, The Long Ancestral Body, grows from a sense that no life stands alone. Each of us is made from the people who came before, and from the soil and seasons that kept them alive, and that continuum moves through us into lives we will never see.
It moves in cycles, and my Kali paintings follow them. Kali is the Goddess of dissolution and transformation, and her name holds the Hindi word kal, which means both yesterday and tomorrow. I find this beautiful. So when I paint her force, I make these paintings aware that they won’t last. Over the years they will break down and return to the earth, and letting them do so is a way of letting the work belong to time.
That return feels natural because some of what I paint with was once part of the earth. Sand, ash, turmeric, sesame oil and kumkum, the red powder offered in worship, all find their way onto my canvases carrying long histories of use. Once there, they keep a life of their own, drying and shifting in ways I can guide but never quite decide.
Lately my photography has turned towards the same ground, through a series about people and their relationship to rest and to nature, the places they go to be still and what those places give back to them.
Across all of it, I’m looking for the moments when a body remembers it is part of the earth’s long breath, and the work is my way of staying close to this knowing"
In line with OmVed Gardens' 2026 theme, Listening as Care, Mohini's practice is an act of attentive listening: to the materials she works with, to the bodies and landscapes that hold memory, and to the slow rhythms of time. Her paintings with sand, ash, turmeric and kumkum are never fully controlled; she guides them but leaves room for them to dry, shift and eventually return to the earth, trusting the work to find its own course rather than imposing a fixed outcome. Her photography extends this attentiveness to people and the places where they rest, asking what stillness and nature offer back when we pause long enough to receive it. Across her work, care takes the form of humility and patience, a willingness to listen to ancestors, ecosystems and the body itself, and to remember that we are sustained by a continuum far larger than ourselves.
Kaur holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BA in French and Philosophy from King’s College London. You can see more of her work on her website: www.studiomohini.com