unseen body

kirti malik creates symbolic figurative works in acrylic on canvas, in which the female body is rendered as psychological terrain — a surface on which memory, vulnerability and emotional presence accumulate and take form. the body, in her practice, functions neither as subject nor as object, but as the site where feeling is internally lived and physically held. working at scales up to 30 by 40 inches, malik begins each painting from an interior register, sketches what resists articulation, employs her own body as reference, and follows the subconscious through the composition until the emotion arrives at form.

the title unseen body operates on two registers: the body the world declines to see, and the interior body the woman carries privately, beneath language. it is this second body that the series renders.

unseen body attends to the unresolved interior of womanhood — emotional states that are not processed or overcome, but inhabited slowly over time. malik does not depict healing. she paints the prolonged interior of feeling: grief that has ceased to announce itself, love that wounds and is held nonetheless, fear that sits alongside surrender without cancelling it, tenderness that has nowhere to go and does not leave. her figures do not perform transformation. they hold tension, and the painting becomes the place where that tension is permitted to exist.

a personal iconography moves through the work. at its centre is the north star — the fixed point the artist turns toward for guidance and hope, appearing as the flower held close to the heart, the bloom at the centre of an empty nest, the lotuses gathered at the figure. around this anchor, further forms accumulate, drawn from the natural world and the night sky, from what blooms and what wounds, from what burns and what flows. these forms are not symbols selected to represent emotion — they are emotion taking shape. their meanings remain the artist's own. what reaches the viewer is not explanation but presence — close enough to feel, never fully disclosed.

the work finds those who already know.