Through her practice, Natalya Hughes investigates the relationships between decorative patterning and art-historical depictions of bodies. In this painting, she reinterprets the ukiyo-e woodblock print Looking cute: the appearance of a housewife in the tenth year of Meiji (1877) 1888, from the famous series ‘Thirty-two aspects of customs and manners’ by Japanese master Tsukioka (Taiso) Yoshitoshi (1839–92). The original print shows a woman holding an infant.

Hughes’s appropriation removes the two figures, instead focusing on their ornate garments, which she has reconfigured using image-editing software and then painted by hand. The background’s teal flower design is taken from the baby’s clothes in Yoshitoshi’s work, while the larger, blue-striped form is taken from the mother’s sleeve. The new arrangement may lack figurative human forms, but it still suggests the presence of bodies through its voluminous folds. Hughes has said that she is interested in ‘how far you can abstract a body and [have] it still be read as a body’.