Mother of Unborn Children, 1989

2.5 x 4.5ft, Oil on Canvas

The female figure in this painting symbolises the new age where women who do not want children use preventive birth control methods. Previous generations had a lack of options for birth control and most women had many children. Like my own grandmother who had 10 children of which my father was the eldest.

In my Kalakar Trust project in a poverty affected community, we found one woman who had 17 pregnancies, out of whom two children did not survive.

The woman in this painting is holding and is surrounded by children she never had.  There is an overwhelming amount of pink and blue in this painting symbolising male and female entities.At the time of making this painting, I was thinking about how many children I would have had if I had not been born in this modern age. The woman in the painting actually symbolises myself and my unborn children.

There is no single meaning to my paintings, I have my own meaning and others can have theirs. At my Mumbai exhibition, a lady who said she was emotionally touched by the painting bought it.  She told me at the time that she had really tried to have children but was unable to do so. She felt this painting represented her feelings and her dream. This shows that paintings can have different meanings for different people who look at them but are very uniting in their emotional relevance.