My Head is a Jungle Exhibition - Manjit Thapp

While the rest of us have spent the past year eating our feelings or doing our best to numb them with box sets, Manjit Thapp has been immersing herself in hers and channelling them into her work. And all that introspection has paid off; at the end of March, the young Birmingham-based illustrator published a graphic novel, Feelings: A Story in Seasons, charting the way one young woman’s moods move through anxiety, hope and joy in line with the changing weather; and she’s conjured a stash of thoughtful new works for her much-anticipated exhibition My Head is a Jungle, set to open at NOW Gallery early this summer.

Thapp’s pieces are dreamy and contemplative, filled with a diverse selection of strong women set against backdrops influenced by nature, fashion and music. “I’d say that my work revolves around female characters,” she says. “I usually go about a piece by thinking about a certain mood or atmosphere that I’m trying to create and then I’ll use icons, symbols and colours to help convey it.” The resulting works are beautifully textured and layered, combining traditional and digital media along with an evocative colour palette. “I think colouring is my favourite part of my process,” she says. “I feel that’s when it most comes to life and, for me, it’s very intuitive – sometimes I have an idea going into it, but a lot of the time the colours just come along as I’m working on the piece.”

Creative ever since she can remember, Thapp studied illustration at Camberwell College of Arts and graduated in 2016. Since then, her commissioned work has spanned from fashion illustrations to drawings of feminist icons as saints, and while she often uses her imagination to conjure up her drawings, the subject matter is becoming increasingly autobiographical. “In terms of artists, I’d say Frida Kahlo is a big inspiration,” she says. “I love her self-portraits and she conveyed a lot of personal narrative in her work in a really brave way – that’s always been really inspiring to me. And I love Matisse’s work as well – it’s so bold and colourful.”

My Head is a Jungle is set to compare the inner workings of our minds to the dense, dark foliage of the jungle, and will be divided into sections titled by different emotions; Hidden Fears, for example, which examines the growing thoughts and tangled feelings that run away with themselves and that, more often than not, we push to the back of our minds. “It feels so timely now – coming out of lockdown, when everything’s been so internal, and we’ve had a lot of time to sit with ourselves,” says Thapp. “It’s very reflective.”

My Head is a Jungle will open at NOW Gallery early this summer nowgallery.co.uk