Monica Mohnot is an Indian American artist based in Austin, Texas. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, she moved to the United States in 2001. She received a BFA in Painting from Texas State University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Working at the intersection of painting and textile, Mohnot approaches painting as a durational, layered process. She constructs the surface itself by designing and weaving cloth before building it through painting, dye, vinyl, collage, and embroidery. Through these accumulated acts of making, her work embeds time, repetition, and attention directly into the material.
Her abstract compositions are composed of organic forms, interlacing lines, and densely layered surfaces that evoke bodies, landscapes, and internal systems without settling into fixed representation. Interested in perception and the experience of looking, she creates works that slow attention, emphasizing the charged interval where forms nearly connect and meaning remains open.
Mohnot’s practice is informed by her South Asian heritage and life in the United States, where questions of place, memory, and material quietly shape an ongoing investigation into accumulation, tension, and becoming. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and exhibited nationally, including at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Women & Their Work, ICOSA Collective, Torrance Art Museum, and the Research House for Asian Arts. She is currently a Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University.
Artist Statement
My practice approaches painting as a durational, layered field built through weaving, stitching, painting, and collage. I construct the surface itself as the painting, designing and weaving cloth from the ground up before adding paint, vinyl, dye, and embroidery. Through this process, duration and temporal conditions of repetition remain visible in the surface, as layered passes of weaving, stitching, and painting accumulate into form. The work investigates how images emerge through sustained attention, proximity, and the slow buildup of fragments over time.
The work is composed of rounded, organic forms, interlacing lines, and dense proximities that suggest bodies, landscapes, or internal systems without resolving into fixed images. Color functions as both surface and substance. Earthy greens, ochres, browns, and blues recur throughout the work, carrying familiarity and memory rooted in lived experience and place. Applied through paint, dye, vinyl, and thread, color becomes tactile—pressed, layered, stitched, and accumulated within the fabric. Charged synthetic hues interrupt these fields, introducing vibration and pressure.
Smooth painted areas sit beside rough, stitched passages, creating surfaces that feel compressed and unsettled. Painting becomes a space within a space—an atmospheric ground laid over woven structure that holds or resists the stitched line. Layering functions as both method and meaning: forms accumulate, hover, and nearly connect, emphasizing the space just before contact.
My work engages with perception—how looking slows and sensation intensifies through proximity and repetition. Drawing from ideas of the positive sublime and the erotics of presence, the work holds a charged interval before dissolution, where fullness is felt but resolution is withheld. With roots in South Asian Indian culture and based in the United States, my relationship to place, memory, and material quietly informs a practice grounded in tension and becoming.
