Suchitra Mattai’s painting The Fire Inside depicts a woman seated in the company of three lions. The woman is smiling, and the lions are docile. In her left hand, the woman is controlling two golden lightning bolts. The painting is made from a mixture of traditional mediums, such as acrylic and gouache paints, needlework appliqués, and the two hand-embroidered, gold, biomorphic forms in the upper corners of the piece, and others that specifically relate to Mattai’s Indo-Caribbean heritage, such as sari fabric. Mattai’s paintings show a mythic, dreamlike, feminine past, caught between space and time. The Fire Inside's highly symbolic representation of a female figure displaying mastery over lions could be perceived as something mythical—maybe a reference to the figure of Mother Durga who rides a lion to symbolize a display of control over Dharma, ego, and will. Or, made partly from vintage saris and domestic labor techniques such as embroidery that the artist learned from her grandmother, it could be read more as a contemporary statement about shifting gender roles, feminine power, and the intercultural search for identity.

Mattai’s work is in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Taylor Art Collection, among others, and has been reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, the Boston Globe, Widewalls, and Wallpaper Magazine, among others. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, UAE; State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum/the Momentary; MCA Denver, CO, USA; Boise Museum of Art, ID, USA; Center for Visual Arts, Metropolitan State University of Denver, CO, USA and the San Antonio Museum of Art, TX, USA.

About her multimedia paintings, Mattai says, “I wanted to communicate something about that disorienting experience of living through multiple cultures. To me, this work enters that mythical space less through narrative, and more through a psychological discussion."