Today we’d like to introduce you to Monica Mohnot.
Hi Monica, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was born in Kolkata, India, and have been based in the United States since 2001. My early life was shaped by a strong awareness of cultural displacement and shifting identities, which continues to inform my work.
I trained as a painter, completing my BFA at Texas State University and my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During my graduate studies, my practice expanded to include weaving and textile processes, not as a departure from painting but as a way to extend its language.
My work now operates at the intersection of painting and textile. I use a digital Jacquard loom to construct surfaces that I then transform through dyeing, painting, and hand stitching. This hybrid process allows me to engage questions of materiality, time, and perception in ways that felt increasingly necessary to my practice.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I don’t think a meaningful practice emerges from a smooth trajectory.
One of the central challenges has been building a materially intensive practice that depends on specialized infrastructure. Working with Jacquard weaving requires access, time, and resources that are not always readily available, which has shaped both the scale and rhythm of my work.
There has also been the ongoing negotiation between a slow, process-driven practice and an art ecosystem that often prioritizes visibility and speed. I’ve made a deliberate choice to stay committed to the demands of the work rather than adjust it for convenience.
Those constraints have ultimately become generative. They have sharpened my focus and deepened my relationship to the material and conceptual concerns that drive the work.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I create handwoven textile paintings that expand the field of painting through the integration of digital weaving, dye painting processes, and hand-based interventions.
The work begins with digitally constructed compositions that are translated into woven structures using cotton thread. These woven surfaces function as a base layer rather than a finished object. I then alter them through dyeing, painting, heat transfer, and embroidery, allowing the surface to accumulate multiple temporal and material registers.
Visually, the work often manifests as abstract, organic terrains that reference bodily and environmental forms. Conceptually, I am interested in attention, internal time, and the thresholds between structure and softness, control and surrender, and the digital and the hand.
What distinguishes my practice is this sustained engagement with hybridity, not just in medium, but in thinking. The work resists categorization as either painting or textile, and instead operates in the tension between them.
What I am most committed to, and proud of, is maintaining the integrity of a slow, labor-intensive process. Each work holds an extended duration of making, which is central to its meaning.
What makes you happy?
I’m most engaged when I’m inside the process of making, particularly in moments where repetition and attention begin to shift my sense of time.
There is a point in the studio where the work moves beyond decision-making and enters a different kind of awareness, one that is less about control and more about attunement. That state is both grounding and expansive, and it’s where the work feels most alive.
I’m also interested in how that experience translates outward. If the work can hold even a trace of that sustained attention and offer it to a viewer, as a pause, a recalibration, or a moment of stillness, then it’s doing what I need it to do.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.monicamohnot.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monica.mohnot/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-mohnot-083811b0/
