How and why did you start your artistic career?

From an early age I’ve been fascinated by observation and transformation—by how ideas, materials, or perceptions can shift and take form. My path has been shaped by an ongoing attempt to reconcile different ways of knowing: the analytical and the intuitive, the scientific and the artistic.

For a long time, these worlds felt distant, but I gradually realised they were part of the same impulse to understand alchemical transformation—how things change, decay, or come into being. During my years in science, I began to feel the limits of a language that separated mind from body, matter from meaning. I wanted to work in a way that could hold thought and experience together. Art became that space—an open field where processes, materials, and ideas could coexist and inform each other.

I joined the Turps Mentoring Programme in London, where I refined my visual language and deepened my understanding of painting and material processes. I later completed a Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art (2024), where my practice evolved toward installation and process-based work. My artistic practice has since become a way to connect different parts of my experience, to approach knowledge as something that emerges through making, reflection, and exchange.

How did you discover your medium and why did you choose it?

I work across a broad range of media, which comes from an experimental approach to art-making. I’m interested in how different materials behave, react, and transform, and how these processes can become part of the work’s meaning.

Rather than starting from a fixed medium, I let each project determine its own form—whether that means working with pigments, pastel, ink, photographic emulsion, clay, handmade paper, or chemical solutions. This openness allows me to move fluidly between image and object, surface and structure.

My background in science also shaped this approach: I tend to think through testing, observation, and repetition. Working across media gives me the freedom to follow those transformations wherever they lead, and to explore how matter itself can hold memory and affect.

Can you tell us about your creative process?

My practice is rooted in long-term research that draws from archives, natural sciences, psychogeography, and feminist theory. I’m interested in how materials carry memory and how they participate in systems of meaning and belief. Each project begins with a period of study and observation that often unfolds alongside experimentation in the studio.

Reliquary of the Senses, for instance, developed from research at the Victoria and Albert Museum into nineteenth-century mourning relics made from arranged hair. The work explores the relic as a cultural apparatus for interpreting matter, binding material presence to systems of belief and power. At once theological and political, it defines who may own, touch, or display sacred matter.

Yet relics also acknowledge the vibrancy of matter itself—their potency depends on the conviction that fragments can act, radiate, or heal. In this sense, they already destabilise the Cartesian dualism of matter and spirit, exposing their apparent oxymoron. Rather than resolving these contradictions, Reliquary of the Senses inhabits them.

Through this dialogue between containment and material vibrancy, the series challenges dualistic thinking and the anthropocentric impulse to define and stabilise the unruly vitality of matter.

How does your work come to life?

In my process, I treat the image as matter. I often cover drawings in pastel and ink with successive layers of gesso, erasing and re-emerging forms through gestures of addition and removal.

I combine these with materials that remain active—handmade paper from plants, photographic emulsion, bleach, acidic and basic solutions, unfired clay—allowing transformation and instability to become part of the work.

In Reliquary of the Senses, lithographic images are rubbed with pigments, scraped with razors, and left with bleach to react on their surface, accepting their ongoing erosion over time. The arched frames, recalling sacred architecture, function as structures that fix and contain meaning, while the materials resist this control: corroding, leaking, transforming.

How long does it take you to create a piece? When do you know it is finished?

My works usually take a long time to develop. I often return to them over weeks or months—adding, removing, or reconfiguring elements until they find their own balance. The process is rarely linear; it’s more like an ongoing conversation with the work.

Sometimes I tear or rearrange a piece long after I first considered it complete. I think of each work as a living entity rather than a fixed object—it continues to evolve, to react, to shift in meaning over time.

A piece feels finished when it reaches a point of equilibrium between intention and material response, when it no longer needs my intervention to exist on its own.

Who are your favorite artists? Which ones are you inspired by?

I’m drawn to artists who work with material transformation and embodied knowledge. Figures like Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, and Cecilia Vicuña have deeply influenced the way I think about the relationship between body, land, and matter. Their practices explore the permeability between human and nonhuman, life and decay, memory and landscape.

I also look to artists such as Chiara Camoni and Bianca Bondi, whose work engages ritual and process as a form of collaboration. Their installations often evolve autonomously, reflecting the same kind of material vitality that interests me.

Beyond visual art, I’m inspired by thinkers and activists like Silvia Federici, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett, whose feminist and ecological perspectives challenge the idea of matter as passive. Their writing has helped me understand the studio as a space of entanglement, where materials are active participants rather than objects of control.

These voices—artistic and theoretical—shape how I approach making as a dialogue between agency, care, and transformation.

THE ARTIST

Name: Eliana Marinari
Residence: Italy

FEATURED WORKS