London-based artist Cara Nahaul saturates landscapes and interiors with colour and imagination to create sites of reflection upon identity, culture and memory. Her vibrant paintings explore the character of tropical places, in particular those connected with her familial heritage. In these works,
pink palms sway against lemon hued skies, row boats lay scattered across scarlet beaches, and periwinkle mountains loom in the distance.

Painting from personal memories, photographs, and stories collected from her childhood and present-day, Nahaul uses flattened perspectives, pattern, and the simplification of form to allow a sense of place to take precedence over any straightforward representation of location or narrative.

Nahaul’s invented settings shift between the highly fictive and fantastically real, alluding to a personal and psychological undercurrent that quietly reverberates throughout. The artist invites viewers to imagine how they might mine, reconstruct and reflect upon their own personal histories.

This publication brings together drawings in pastel, pencil and charcoal, the monograph replicates the
look and feel of an artist sketchbook, punctuated with Nahaul’s hand-written texts.