Jayati Bose

Jayati Bose (b. 1980, Asansol, India) is a Mumbai-based self-taught and a multidisciplinary artist working across multiple mediums such as sculpture, watercolour, drawing and charcoal. Using terracotta, beaten brass, reclaimed wood, iron and paper, she explores the relationship between memory, the body and silence, examining how lived experience is carried through gesture, repetition, material and ritual.

Bose’s work is centered around an enquiry. A question to invisible inheritances – the human behaviour. She delves into the emotional structures, social codes and domestic systems that shape human behaviour across generations. Her work does not depict direct events, rather they investigate the remnants of events. They explore how memory, trauma and resilience continue to inhabit the body over time. Her work frequently considers the body as an archive, one that quietly records histories that remain unspoken while retaining traces of experiences long after language has failed.

These questions find an apt expression in Return Without Arrival, an ongoing sculptural series addressing the enduring effects of intrafamilial childhood sexual abuse and the intergenerational silences that allow such episodes to remain concealed. Drawing upon forms associated with childhood, ritual and movement, the series examines the relationships between memory, survival and the social structures that sustain silence.

Running parallel to this sculptural body of work is Women at Leisure, an ongoing watercolour series depicting women in moments of rest, companionship and solitude. These paintings,through restrained compositions and quiet but keen observations,   reclaim leisure as a form of agency, challenging expectations that women’s lives must be defined by labour, sacrifice or care.

Deeply informed by the literary, artistic and material traditions of Bengal while engaging with contemporary questions of gender, memory and power, Bose creates works that privilege contemplation over spectacle and emotional truth over narrative certainty.