"Mare Positum #1" Painting

Ariadna Dane (b. 1984) uses nature as a way of approaching personal experiences that resist direct depiction. Growing up in Siberia, where both people and landscape endure extremes, informed her attention to the parallels between how natural and human systems adapt, persist and change under pressure.

Rooted in biomorphic abstraction, Dane’s earlier series, Basal Elements and Organic Wreaths, carry loss, impermanence and transience inside both the structural and material logic of the work, without naming them. The works are the outcome of relinquishing control over the process while remaining acutely aware of it - media following its own logic, forms shaped in the moment, cutouts made by hand without template. Learning to work within what cannot be controlled is, in this practice, a way of coming to terms with what cannot be controlled in life.

Running through all of Dane’s work is the cutout, a shape removed by hand from each composition, leaving an absence that remains structurally present. It first appeared by accident in Organic Wreaths and has not left. What is taken away stays active.

Over time the work moved closer to naming the experiences while retaining the structures of indirection through which it first emerged. In Dane’s latest series Tenderbeing, the visual language shifts from abstract biomorphic form to a deliberate botanical form standing in for the personal experiences. Plants bend, become disfigured, and continue. Brief textual fragments accompany the work. They function as points of entry into the emotional terrain the work inhabits.

Ariadna Dane lives and works in Berkshire, UK.