What the Canvas Let Out

Exhaustion , 2026 Acrylic on Canvas, stretched on wooden frame 40 x 40 in View Artwork Details The piece is called Piece of Mind, and the title is a pun that earns its keep. Hansa Sethi made it in acrylic on stretched canvas — the only medium, she said, that could have held the subject: the slow, piece-by-piece removal of a person's mental coherence by accumulated pain. "I cannot make it with a picture," she told me, speaking from Jabalpur in central India, where she lives and works. "I want to show how deadly it is when each and every bit of your mind is taken away slowly, slowly, slowly." The work is not illustrative. It does not depict a mind coming apart. It enacts the sensation of it — the color-saturated surface holding a density that photographs don't fully transmit, a weight that reads differently at scale.Sethi is twenty-nine and has been making art since childhood — drawing on streets with broken brick, sketching on the walls of her house when paper wasn't available. She is self-taught, with no formal institutional training. She has been showing professionally for roughly a year, and in that time her work has appeared at the CICA Museum in South Korea, been shortlisted for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, and shown at the Boomer Gallery on Tooley Street in London. The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg included her in an existentialism-themed online exhibition. She was Highly Commended in the Homiens Art Prize in the United States in the autumn of 2025. For someone twelve months into a public practice, the list is long and geographically scattered.None of that is what she led with. What she led with was depression.During a period of severe depression — she didn't specify when, and I didn't push — Sethi described experiencing what she called an unseen gravity, a weight with no visible source. The worst of it, she said, came at a time when she had everything she could have wanted. "Every time you blame something for your life — oh, I haven't had this, I don't have this — but that was the time when I had everything, and still there was a vacuum in me." Making art was not a therapeutic exercise she undertook in recovery. It was what she did while she was still inside it. "That vacuum is something acrylic and the canvas let me out," she said. "That's why I'm thankful for art for saving me."The work that came out of that period — and that continues to come out of it now, since she describes herself as only somewhat recovered — is not what you might expect from that description. The canvases are bold and color-saturated. She is aware of the apparent mismatch and addresses it without being asked. She wants to show that you can be depressed inside color, that brightness is not evidence of wellness. It is one of the things her work is testing. Depression, in her visual logic, does not require grey. The worst phase of her life, she said, was also a time of apparent fullness — and the color in the work holds that paradox rather than resolving it.Her approach to medium selection is unusually systematic for someone who describes her process as almost entirely intuitive. She has worked out a hierarchy based on emotional register. Drawing with a pen is for the smallest, most precise feelings — the ones that require containment. Markers allow slightly more flow. Acrylic is for when nothing is controlling her and everything needs to come out at once. Photography she treats differently from all of them: it is a flash, a capture of a moment already formed, not something she constructs. She said that pain, as a simple emotion, can be shown with a photograph — a single image catches it whole. The deeper material — the accumulated weight of how a person has been treated over years, the slow erosion that Piece of Mind is about — that requires acrylic and time. "Acrylic make me feel like I'm free," she said. "It's like something inside of me that gets thrown away just as I want, just when I want."The 2025 Homiens Art Prize Highly Commended recognition was, by her account, the achievement that mattered most in her first year of showing. The prize is a US-based open competition; her entry was assessed against an international field. She spoke about it in the same flat tone she used for most of the conversation — not dismissive, but uninterested in the credential for its own sake. What the recognition confirmed for her was less about external validation than about the work finding an audience outside India, outside the immediate context of her life in Jabalpur. Around the same time, Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art in Barcelona ran a curated interview with her — one of the few extended conversations about her practice published before this one. The Kalamrat National Art Exhibition at the National Kalidas Sanskrit Akademi in Ujjain, where she received formal recognition for her contribution to fine art, placed her within an Indian institutional context that sits alongside, rather than in tension with, the international circuit she has been building simultaneously.She is also beginning to work with thread, though she hasn't yet made it central to the practice. The goal, she said, is to expand her range of mediums to match the complexity of what she wants to say. She is interested in what she described as how society ruins you, how others ruin you, and how you ruin yourself — the three directions of damage she sees as the territory of her work going forward. The psychological and philosophical, in her framing, are not separate categories. They are the same inquiry from different angles.When I asked whether Jabalpur — the city itself, its specific character — shapes what she makes, she pushed back. The influence isn't the place, she said. It's the behavior of people she has observed since childhood, the basic questions of why we exist, the psychology that everyone carries regardless of where they live. She has spent her life watching. The observations are the raw material. The city is incidental to that.This is consistent with how she talks about her subjects generally. She is not interested in the personal as confessional — she doesn't seem to want viewers tracking the biography behind each piece. She is interested in whether someone who has suffered recognizes something in the work. Recognition, not explanation, is the point. She said she wants whoever has been through it to be able to see themselves in what she makes. The work is addressed to that person, not to someone who needs the experience described from the outside.Shadows and SheerLeader, both from 2026, sit alongside Piece of Mind in her current portfolio. Social Cult and Three Hoops, both 2025, round out the five most recent pieces. The titles tend to carry a dryness that the color in the work doesn't immediately signal — SheerLeader in particular has the structure of a joke that stops being funny the longer you sit with it. All five are acrylic on canvas, stretched on wooden frames, and the surfaces hold a density that photographs compress into something more decorative than they are in person.Her exhibition record in 2026 already includes Arts North International 31 at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Minnesota, and the Circle 2026 International Exhibition at the CICA Museum in Gimpo. She has been published in Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art out of Barcelona, and her work is forthcoming in Anodyne Magazine and in Tulipwood Books' Seedfall Volume Two: Emergence. For a practice that is, by her own account, only a year old in its professional form, the infrastructure is accumulating fast.She is not, it should be said, particularly interested in talking about any of this. The conversation kept returning to the work itself and to the emotional logic behind medium choice. What animated her was the question of how to show something that resists showing — how to make a person feel the slow erosion of Piece of Mind rather than simply understand it as a concept. When she described the process of making that painting — throwing the acrylic down, layer after layer, the medium's fast-drying surface forcing decisions — she was more precise and more present than at any other point in the conversation. The exhibitions and the prizes registered as context. The canvas registered as the thing itself."I want to make more out of it," she said, near the end of our conversation, speaking about what came after the worst of the depression began to lift. "I want to see more, I want to explore more of the world, and I want to showcase how emotions can be given, how emotions can be seen from the art." Discover more of Hansa Sethi's work and available pieces on their Studio profile. View Hansa Sethi's Profile