If I had to describe Manjot Kaur’s work in a word, I would call it ferocious. Very few works of art, even brave ones, are truly ferocious.
Event Context
While most of us fear the entanglement of the human and the non-human, Kaur builds her paintings around it. Somehow, it makes her work even more human – because it can encourage us to question and think deeper about that we know. That’s the very mark of being human.
The first painting of hers I ever saw, depicted a woman reclining on an embroidered bed in the clouds, shaded by a beautiful tree. But the woman’s head was replaced by that of a bird. This half-human-half-bird had a distinct softness. It made me wonder if the hybrid entity was actually genderless; and also why I assumed the human half was female in the first place.
Kaur was born in Ludhiana, Punjab, and now spends her time between Vancouver and India. Her practice spans animation and immersive interactive installations. In her intricate miniature-style paintings, every tiny detail stands out. Those hybrid creatures fuse seamlessly across species. Look at her Goddesses Birthing Ecosystems series, which questions what it means to be a mother, and the commonplace systems that trap women into domesticity, far away from public politics and the workplace.
One 2021 watercolour from this series is titled When a Tree Grew Out of Her Womb. It references Taweret, the protective Egyptian goddess of mothers and children. She is represented as a mix of hippopotamus, crocodile, lion and human. That combination is delicate yet fierce. Kaur paints her giving birth to a beautiful tree, the plants growing from her vagina stretching out into larger-than-life trunks, branches and leaves.
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It’s the Earth-mother idea we’re familiar with, but Kaur’s details add to the story. Taweret herself is depicted inside a womb or sac, the rest of the painting is mostly bare. For me, this represents the strength that women carry within their bodies, which manifests not just during birth, but in our daily rebellions. It manifests when we see our children endangered. It manifests when we see other women or marginalised groups in danger. Kaur reframes the extraordinariness of birth by weaving in ecological themes. This painting highlights that the hippopotamus and the lion are now extinct in Egypt – a major loss to the ecosystem at large.
Some of Kaur’s works, though beautifully detailed, will seem disconcerting. That’s the whole point. Women’s breasts, reproductive organs and the act of giving birth are all visual taboos. But Kaur bravely brings them back into view with folklore, modern stories and references to the mother goddess. This isn’t just about showing the world that humans, animals plants and the earth are one. It’s that the fight to hold on to them all, to sustain them all, to keep them all thriving are the same. The feminist fight is not separate from the ecological one. The challenge to hold on to history is not at odds with the present. And beauty – even a delicate miniature – is not separate from ugly truths.
Kanishka Puri is based in New York. Her work explores interspecies collaboration and ecological entanglement
From HT Brunch, July 25, 2026
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