At Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the nun who paints

At the sixth Kochi-Muziris Biennale, where scale, spectacle and conceptual brilliance often dominate the viewer’s field of vision, the drawings and terracotta sculptures of Malu Joy (Sister Roswin CMC) operate at an entirely different register. They do not seek attention so much as they require it. To encounter them fully is to slow down, to listen, and to accept vulnerability as both subject and method.

“Ultimately, my practice is about stillness and attention,” says Malu Joy, the first nun to participate in the Biennale. “It is about sitting with another human being, acknowledging their inner life, and allowing that presence to shape the work slowly, without urgency.”

That stillness is not accidental. It is cultivated through a process that is as relational as it is artistic. “My practice in sculpture and painting is always rooted in people who are somehow connected to me, or at least familiar to my everyday life,” she explains. “I spend time with them, I sit with them, and I try to build a personal bond. It is not something that happens immediately.”

Understanding, she insists, arrives only through duration. “After completing several works, perhaps ten or so, I begin to feel that I am getting closer to them, that I am starting to understand who they are.”

This slow intimacy is visible in works such as ‘Mother I’ and ‘Mother II’, part of her Biennale presentation, where the human figure appears neither idealised nor dramatised. Instead, it is quietly exposed, carrying the weight of lived experience.

“What interests me is never the outer appearance of a person,” she says. “I am not concerned with physical beauty or surface likeness. Instead, I look for inner emotions, character and temperament.”

Her background in psychology informs this inward gaze. “It allows me to observe people closely and to sense the life stories they carry within them,” she reflects. “How they have dealt with hardship, how they have survived certain experiences, and how they are living in the present moment.”

The vulnerability is not imposed but received. “The vulnerability you sense comes from this process of listening and observing rather than imposing my own ideas onto the figure,” she says.

Significantly, Malu Joy avoids depicting those closest to her emotionally. “I never draw people who are extremely close to me on a personal level,” she says. Instead, she turns her attention to those who inhabit the periphery of everyday life: fellow nuns, elderly residents of the convent, colleagues, acquaintances, people quietly observed rather than intimately claimed. It is in this slight distance, paradoxically, that her empathy deepens.

Her work often exists in a liminal space between documentation and memory. “I cannot point to one single moment or formula that triggers the beginning of a work,” she admits. “Often, when I see certain people, I feel something difficult to explain. There is an urge to know more about them, to understand their presence.” That urge slowly finds form through drawing, painting or sculpture, without a predetermined outcome.

When working with elderly subjects, this impulse takes on an archival quality. “In those cases, the artwork functions almost as a form of remembrance,” she says. “It allows them to continue existing in some way, beyond the fleeting nature of daily encounters.”

Conversations become integral, and memory enters the work unbidden. “My own memories sometimes enter the work as well. This does not happen consciously or consistently; it emerges naturally, without planning,” explains the artist.

This oscillation between observation and recollection, between the external presence of another and the artist’s own internal landscape, is central to her practice. “That tension is important to me,” she notes.

What makes Malu Joy’s position particularly singular within the Kerala art scene is her dual identity as a practising artist and a nun. She resists any suggestion of novelty. For her, spiritual life and artistic practice are inseparable. “Being a sister has allowed me to dive deeply into the realms of art,” she says. “From the moment I entered convent life, I was encouraged to look beneath the surface of things, to explore meaning rather than accept appearances.”

Her work, she believes, carries the imprint of this attentiveness. “There is always a sense of strain, stress and survival running through it. These are not abstract concepts for me; they are realities I observe in people’s lives every day.”

Raised watching her father paint and design gardens, Malu Joy’s artistic instincts predate convent life. Yet it was within the convent that her practice found direction. During the Covid lockdown, she painted biblical scenes and lettering on convent walls, work that led to formal training at RLV College, Tripunithura.

From using waste paper and pavements as early surfaces, her journey has been marked by quiet persistence rather than ambition. “My art is not exactly prayer, nor is it purely inquiry,” she reflects. “It exists somewhere in between, as a sustained act of contemplation.”