Paola Ciarska

Paola Ciarska was born in 1993 in Gdańsk, Poland. Aged 11 she moved to the UK and lived and worked in Newcastle for 16 years. She obtained a First Class Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts & Art History from Newcastle University. She is currently working from her home studio in Sicily, Italy. Paola’s miniature figurative paintings are mostly conceived in her imagination. They depict completely made up rooms that belong to her never ending imaginary parallel universe. In these works, she mostly uses objects from the inventory of her mind and a blend of real life snapshots collected through extensive online research as well as real life. Throughout the years as her practice evolved, the process of arranging and imagining the rooms has become very instinctive. As she begins to paint a new painting she never really knows what the painting will look like relying solely on her automatic response to her medium and surface that she is working on. Elaborate and colourful collages of mysterious interior spaces, encapsulated in a tiny scale painting, are immersing us in a new parallel universe that is ever evolving. In this universe, dwellings become fantasies, interlocking rooms of impossible architecture whose iconic, brightly coloured contents oscillate between the imaginary and mundane. Each composition is a marriage of documentation and imagination. Through Ciarska’s paintings, we are granted access to worlds and interiors that we probably couldn’t find anywhere, however; partly because there is an imaginative element to her work, but also because it reveals elements of our hidden, interior lives – those ‘taboo’ subjects that are less often revealed.