JAYATI KAUSHIK

I am a printmaker and visual artist based in New Delhi, India, working primarily with intaglio and relief techniques such as drypoint, linocut, and wood engraving. These slow, tactile methods mirror the emotional terrain I explore through my work: safety, memory, femininity, and the quiet assertion of presence. My work maps the emotional and physical landscapes of safety, tracing the spaces where I have felt secure, even if only for a moment. Growing up in New Delhi, often regarded as one of the most unsafe cities for women, this pursuit is deeply personal. Over time, I’ve come to understand that safety is not merely the absence of harm, but the freedom to exist without fear. As a woman of colour, this longing becomes more complex, layered with societal expectations, difference, and visibility. Navigating public space often feels like a daily negotiation between presence and protection. To feel safe is to feel unobserved, unburdened, unafraid. That desire, to move freely, to inhabit space with ease, forms the emotional undercurrent of my visual language. My imagery draws from a deeply personal vocabulary: my mother’s shawl, my father’s jacket, quiet corners of architecture, the soft hush of natural spaces. These aren’t subjects, they are emotional triggers, psychological shelters, and symbolic containers of care. They allow me to map where I, as a woman, have felt anchored. Although I studied printmaking formally, earning my BFA from the College of Art in New Delhi and my MFA from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, where I strived and graduated as the national topper; my engagement with drypoint has been entirely self-led. This technique, rarely taught or practiced in India, has felt instinctive to me. Its scarcity has only deepened my bond with it. In nurturing and growing a technique often overlooked in my country, I found a quiet parallel with the way women, too, are often expected to endure like a whisper in the wind . I sense a kinship between the labor of printmaking and the emotional labor women carry, requiring patience, strength, and a deep sense of nurturing. The act of wiping, carving, pressing – all done slowly, carefully, and intimately, reminds me of how a lady might preserve and protect the delicateness of a memory, emotion, and inner sanctuaries. Drypoint allows me to etch presence and absence into the plate, with each mark an echo of feeling towards resistance – softly, gently, little by little. Linocut and wood engraving feel as if acts of reclamation: carving out imagined sanctuaries, tangible spaces for inner safety to take form. Through these processes, I preserve emotional moments like maps, impressions of places, people, and sensations where I have felt protected or longed to be. As I enter this next phase of my practice, working in new environments and encountering unfamiliar cultural textures, I’m curious to see how my understanding of safety shifts. What would it mean to feel safe in new Geography? How do other women navigate space, visibility, and memory in their own terrain? This is not only a time of creation but of transition, maybe different than ever: a season of paying attention, and learning through others, and allowing those observations to inform the emotional geographies I trace in my prints. Ultimately, my practice is an act of gentle war . A way to assert that softness is strength. That care is a valid form of resistance. And that the spaces we long for – quiet, unobserved, and safe, can be etched into being, one mark at a time.