Silk is a recurrent substrate for Mahinay’s paintings, in works that acknowledge, through their translucency, their whole selves – front and back, inside and out. In certain paintings, she will begin on one side of the silk and then reverse it; in others, she may sew silk gloves into the painting, as if literalizing her own touch. In very many of Mahinay’s paintings, whether on silk or linen, she will apply paint or pigment with her fingers, leaving scale-like dabs or sinuous smears as records of her physical interaction with her work. In her ceramic sculptures, fingermarks often inflect the surfaces of forms that relate to other bodies, as if the work is the outcome of a meeting between two beings – the artist and her subject.

Throughout Mahinay’s work, there is a sense of the artist finding the painting through her manipulation of materials – and of her materials finding their own form, as when she allows rivulets of poured paint to make their way across a tilted canvas. Such effects introduce a further dimension to her painting: that of time, which is folded into a single work then arrested in its final stillness. It is up to the viewer, through slow and patient looking, to set it in motion once again.