Shailee Mehta's artistic practice stems from an ongoing dialogue between a personal space of imagination and nostalgia, and the weaving of history, memory and contemporary society. Working extensively with elements of figuration and embodiment, she situates the female body as a central agential subject in her explorations around femininity and visibility. Her work is descriptive of a poetics of space where elements of the interior and the exterior blend into each other: hence her protagonists are placed in domestic settings and yet their features, colours and forms merge with their natural environment, given them an unsettling ‘untamed’ appearance. Rooted in the female gaze, her female figures subvert patriarchal tropes, and the narratives of looking and being looked at take up multiple meanings such as desire, contemplation or rejection.

This painting began as a response to the past couple of years and the effect of the pandemic on our collective emotional systems.
The figures speak of empathy and grief, and aren’t necessarily two different bodies, but two emotional states. On the other hand, they could very well be an embodiment of sisterhood/female friendships. There is also a deliberate silence in the painting as an acknowledgment to intimacy and touch, a rarity in recent times. This also comes across in presence of the window as a clear difference between the inside and the outside.