Louisa Chircop - Tongue against the cactus

Mixed media and photomontage on watercolour paper
72 x 90 x 3 cm
2025

My practice explores emotional and psychological architectures through surreal, symbolic imagery grounded in personal and bicultural experience. Working primarily in painting, alongside experimental multidisciplinary approaches including drawing, ceramics, digital photography, installation and mixed media, I examine memory, ritual, and the shadow self, often using the female body as a site of transformation. For some time, I have investigated grottos, water systems, and subterranean spaces as metaphors for interior states, sanctity, and alien presence within familiar landscapes. These spaces operate as thresholds between concealment and revelation, where vulnerability and endurance coexist. Through ambiguous juxtapositions and symbolic tension, I construct environments in which pleasure and pain exist simultaneously, suggesting that what is hidden beneath the surface quietly shapes what is seen, believed, and inherited.