Una d'Aragona

I am interested in exploring ideas about transformation and change primarily affecting the body, through oil paint on canvas. The medium of oil paint is important to me, for it’s fluidity, viscosity and ability to interpret the visceral experience of having a body; its fluids, skin and muscle and what it feels like on the inside.  I aim to hold a tension between opposites of beauty and the abject, embodiment and spirituality.  The physical and psychological aspects of transformation which are described in classic folk tales and mythologies allow a portal to another world as does the painting itself.  

In my paintings figures and heads emerge from lyrical swirls of paint, are gendered, hermaphroditic, non-binary, – animals cavort and bray, humans and animals connect and merge, their bodies elongate, bulge twist and turn.  I aim to explore the tumultuous landscape of the human body and psyche, making the interior exterior, grappling with a visual language that can give an emotional resonance to felt experiences. Treading an edge between figurative and abstract elements, improvisation allows for chance, accident and spill and for these to become meaningful.  This echoes what makes us human: our mistakes, our spills and oozes, become the mouldering compost that engenders who we are. There is allure in the abject.  My work strives to find a place for the whole experience of human and nature, the monstrous and the beautiful, displaying the two nakedly intertwined.