* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Lya Nagado received an MA from City and Guilds of London School of Art in 2011. Prior to that she studied at Princes School of Traditional Arts and at various schools in Spain and Brazil.
She describes her paintings as evading the first impression and depicting ‘liminal beings’ that are intended to reveal deeper possibility than the eye can perceive—a realm of myth and fantasy in which multiple states of being can exist within one physical body.
Nagado favors materials used in the Late Gothic period because she regards more modern materials as ready-made and mass-produced, and thus incompatible with her goal of finding the intimate connection between past and present. By imagines her laborious process of traditional craftsmanship as the path of our cultural memory to its ancestral and mythical past.
The liminal figures in her work can represent somebody or something of a mixed, hybrid nature or a temporality, she says. Equally, they could signify the fusion of two or more separate beings.
