Across the Veil: A Cultural Narrative in Public Art

There is a particular tension that lives in the body of anyone who has inherited two worlds. It is not conflict, exactly. It is more like a threshold, a place where memory and present tense overlap, where inherited landscapes sit behind the eyes while entirely different skylines fill the view ahead. Across the Veil was conceived as a monumental expression of that threshold, a large-scale public art mural that gives visible form to the invisible architecture of cultural identity.

The composition is anchored by a colossal female figure adorned in traditional South Asian jewellery, her eyes gently closed in a state that reads as both meditation and remembrance. Her red veil does not simply drape. It extends across the entire wall, becoming a landscape unto itself, carrying within its folds the purple mountains, blue horizons, and distant caravans of a homeland that exists as much in collective memory as in geography.

The Narrative

KINN Studios approached this work as an exercise in architectural storytelling. The wall was not treated as a flat surface to decorate but as a spatial threshold between interior and exterior, between private cultural memory and the public realm. The figure's scale was intentional. At this size, she does not invite casual observation. She commands presence. Passersby do not glance at this work; they stand beneath it, confronted by the weight and beauty of a narrative that is simultaneously intimate and universal.

The colour story operates on two registers. The rich, saturated reds of the veil carry warmth, movement, and an almost textile quality, as though the wall itself were draped in fabric. Against this, the blues and purples of the distant mountains introduce a cooler, more contemplative register, the colours of distance, of things half-remembered, of places you carry in your body rather than visit with your feet. A crescent moon and celestial forms punctuate the composition, grounding the work in the visual traditions of South Asian miniature painting while operating at a scale that belongs entirely to contemporary public art.

Process and Intention

The lower portion of the collage reveals the artist at work on a ladder, brush in hand, the mural still in progress. This is not incidental documentation. It is a deliberate inclusion that speaks to the nature of the work itself: that cultural identity is not a finished composition but an ongoing act of painting, of choosing which landscapes to carry forward and which to let blur at the edges. The process photographs capture the physical reality of working at monumental scale, the bodily commitment required to translate deeply personal narrative into a public statement that can hold its ground against an entire building facade.

Across the Veil stands as one of the most personally significant works in the KINN Studios portfolio. It is public art in the fullest sense, not because it exists outdoors, but because it takes a private, interior experience and offers it to the commons. For anyone who has navigated the space between inherited culture and adopted home, this mural is a mirror. For everyone else, it is a window.