Jacintha is the muse who inspired Kuhn’s latest series, She Disappeared into Complete Silence, named after Louise Bourgeois’ first monograph; Kuhn is adamant that, although her and Bourgeois’ work may appear very different at first, they share “a similar curiosity in using the body and elements of architecture to express the mind and the unconscious”. She’s confident the series is her best work yet; it sees her acclaimed capacity for intimate portraiture fuse with new experimental ways of seeing, an abstraction of the nude that she’s still trying to define. Combined with the stark angular lines of Modernist architecture and the brutal but beautiful dunes of the desert, Jacintha’s body is distorted, patterned, translucent, reflected, and refracted. Kuhn knows her images are provocative – it’s not everyday you see a woman running around naked in the wild – but she’s interested in harnessing these reactions, encouraging deeper contemplations of both what is really revealed, and more intriguingly, what remains hidden in her images.
