Celia Paul: Myself, Among Others

‘Venice is full of memory – my own memories, everyone’s memories. Nothing has changed since the time Proust visited Venice with his mother – later transforming the visit into the chapter in the fifth book of In Search of Lost Time, titled Sojourn in Venice. It is a heartbreaking passage. Both he and his mother are grieving for lost loved ones. The grief washes through his experience of being in Venice, just as the water of the canals washes constantly through and against the decaying grandeur of the buildings.’ – Celia Paul

Celia Paul’s art is founded on deep connections – familial, creative, looping back and forth across time – to people and places, often finding in literature and art history tutelary spirits that resonate with her career-long enquiry into the complexities of interior and exterior life, constancy and change.

Against a backdrop of Venice, a city where liquid and solid, past and present, art and actuality, are held in fragile balance, the essential themes of Paul’s work, its focus on memory and mortality, and the formation of self as part of a broader continuum of creative expression, assume extraordinary resonance.