Figure II
Figure II (2006) depicts a pregnant woman leaning over a table, as though about to go into labour. Part of a series of works called ‘Bodies’ by Jai Chuhan, this intimate and impressionistic drawing is drawn from the artist’s personal experience, as well as secondary sources including medical diagrams, film footage, and the tantric diagram-like images of childbirth in South Asian art. In the artist’s own words, her intention was to transcribe ‘not only the physical experience of birth, but also the emotional and psychic experience, encompassing polarities of pleasure and pain’. The simplistic geometric lines create the impression of interior space, within which the figure appears as a spectacle captured in the intimate moment of labour.