Lya Nagado

Lya studied at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts and at City and Guilds of London Art School, which lead to her current practice mixing contemporary imagery and ancient processes.

The foreign in us / Our otherness

Otherness: strange, outlandish, foreign, alien, ghostly, double, empty vessel, mask, uncanny, sublime. In their muted, seamless surface, my works recall infantile desires and, at the same time, the fear of the other. A silent menace bringing out the drive for both life and death dimly sensed within ourselves, so close to our mundane reality, yet so deeply buried.

My paintings and sculptures suggest otherness by representing liminal states of animation – or inanimation, between reality and fantasy. The transcendent themes reminisce of those of sacred images, which today are incorporated inconspicuously in the way we depict ourselves, but devoid of the original meaning.

The suggestion of distortion of temporality is also present in my choice of materials and techniques. By using historical crafts and natural materials and pigments, I hope to draw attention to the questioning of the contemporary iconography. I follow the path of our cultural memory to its ancestral mythical past – the thread of the intimate connection between a common ‘then’ and the multiple ‘now’.

+ Info: http://www.lyanagado.com/