Loftt Gallery, 63 Rosalino Street, Woodbrook
October 30 – November 14, 2026
“To be gendered ‘female’ is to be caught between beauty and excess: made to choose. To be a monster is to insist on both.”
— Lauren Elkin, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
In Between Beauty and Excess, Hannah Seucharan (b. 2003) draws on the figure of the soucouyant to examine the boundaries between the monstrous and the human, the acceptable and the transgressive. Rooted in Caribbean folklore, the soucouyant occupies a space between appearances, transforming from an ordinary woman into something feared. Through this figure, Seucharan considers how monstrosity becomes a means of marking those who exist beyond the boundaries of socially prescribed femininity.
The female body occupies a central place in this inquiry. Distorted, fragmented, and suspended between beauty and horror, the figures resist the expectation that women remain desirable, docile, and contained. Their bodies become sites of conflict between the self and the gaze of others, revealing the shame that attaches to those who fail, or refuse, to conform.
Drawing on the visual language of body horror, Seucharan unsettles the ideals through which femininity is constructed and policed, exposing the violence inherent in the demand to be recognisable, acceptable, and whole.
Working primarily with acrylics, Seucharan translates these concerns into an expressive visual language shaped by distortion, abstraction, and immediacy. Her process is often rapid and cathartic, allowing emotion to take form without the subsequent revisions that might bring a painting into conformity with expectation. The resulting images retain something of this unmediated encounter: a negotiation between control and surrender, recognition and estrangement.
Situated within a conservative Caribbean context, Between Beauty and Excess contributes to ongoing feminist conversations about the policing of women’s bodies, desire, and identity. Rather than offering a stable alternative to the ideals it challenges, the exhibition embraces the uncertainty of existing between categories. Its figures suggest that what society names monstrous may reveal less about the nature of the figure itself than about the limits of the world that seeks to contain it.
About the Artist
Hannah Seucharan (b. 2003) explores the tensions between female desire and conservative Caribbean culture as it pertains to hetero-patriarchal ideologies. Her work deconstructs these colonial concepts and discusses sexuality through the lens of multiplicity versus fragmentation. Whereas the former explores finding community through one’s identity, the latter demonstrates how it can simultaneously isolate you from wider society. The distorted image of the female body is a dominant motif, as it allows her to reconcile with her personhood and consider existence as an act of resistance. Using acrylics and gesso, she creates abstracted forms that bridge the gap between beauty and horror. Ambiguity and fluidity are key to her practice, as they enable her to reject fixed representations of femininity, instead establishing new meaning.
Opening night photos
