Livelihood / Domestic Flights
Cara Nahaul at Frestonian Gallery
This week I went to the Frestonian Gallery in Notting Hill for the first time to see Cara Nahaul’s Livelihood. The space is located in the People’s Hall, a building that was the focal point of the ‘Republic of Frestonia’ protest group that declared independence from the UK in 1977 and even submitted an application to the UN. This cultural community of free thinkers, artists, and writers still exists in this neighborhood, and the gallery echoes the name in its forefather’s footprints.
The current exhibition is based around Mauritius, where the artist’s family originates from. Nahaul’s lively color scheme and vacant scenery reminds me of artist Patrick Caulfield. However Nahaul’s paintings seem fuller, less focused on outline and instead building contrast through consistent shifts in hue. I am drawn again and again to the stout sun pressing into the sky in each of her depictions, sometimes the color of an egg yolk, other times an intense periwinkle. The heat of it seems to impress upon the canvas, and radiate across the room.
Cara Nahaul, Reverie #8, 2024. Oil on linen paper. 65 x 50 cm
In the second gallery, the space unfolds onto a new series entitled Domestic Flights, 2025, highlighting works put together by the artist being currently exhibited. Nahaul has curated artworks by a group similarly focused on spatial complexity, but within the context of individual experience and anthropological places. She describes: “From sun-scorched houses to dimly lit bedrooms, the exhibition delves into the emotional and psychological resonance of domestic spaces.”
Featured in this space are artists Jai Chuhan, Miyeon Yi, Mircea Teleagã, and Anna Sebastian, who tackle the relationships between identity, rituals, gender, and religion within a domestic landscape. I was most taken with a small, sleek, wooden box that leaned on its side, like a door ajar, tempting me to look in. Inside, I found Erasing You is Erasing Me, 2024, a minute set of dual canvases fitted within the box’s compartments to portray a scene of intrigue. Multiple characters seemed to be cohabitating this small chest, enraptured in their own complicated narratives, completely unaware of the gallery-goers peering in on them.
Miyeon Yi, Erasing You is Erasing Me, 2024. Egg tempera on wooden box with key.
In the back room are a continuation of Nahaul’s works for Livelihood, along with some studies that show her process in composing each painting. I notice that her sketches seem to include more detail than her paintings; in the final product there is a simplification as she flattens the image that alludes to vague memory. While Domestic Flight has a plethora of specificity in experience and cultural markers that resonate with each artist, Nahaul’s works operate on a “less is more” basis. Her fluid, functional, and transitional spaces are depicted as peaceful, empty, and entirely liminal. They succeed most of all in their equivocal intent, encompassing the multifaceted history of an island with a complex political and colonial background, acknowledging both past and present without extricating the two.
* Images courtesy of Frestonian Gallery.