"Secret Knowledge" Analogue Double Exposure Photograph mounted on Oak Framed Lightbox - Limited Edition 1 of 3 Photograph

Born in Transylvania, Ioana Vrabie grew up in Tuscany, Italy. Being a mix between two opposite cultures, her original communist one and her new capitalistic one, propelled her to develop an inquisitive approach towards life and constantly search for her own personal truth. She showed an early inclination towards arts and crafts, especially collage and mixed media, winning a few local prizes. At the age on sixteen her grandfather gifted her with a Zorki 6 (the Eastern European version of Leica II) and her love for photography started. It was only in her late twenties that she decided, after travelling the world as flight attendant and being exposed to the variety of the World for almost a decade, to enroll at University of Arts London and take her passion to the next level. She started to work as digital commercial photographer and at Photofusion, a camera club that kept alive her old love for analogue. There she received a providential gift from a stranger: a bag full of expired film rolls that she took together with her analogue camera on a long trip to Italy, India and Bali in search of a capturing a reality that does not need retouching. During this trip she felt overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings and she instinctively started to allow her eyes to wander and her body to move through space, and shoot multiple exposure images, feeling a deep sense of liberation arising from overlapping different perspectives on the same film frame. The ongoing series Eyescapes was born, as direct extension of her life travel: curious, with lots of "aha moments", restless yet calm, expressed in the form of multi-dreamy and mesmeric souvenirs. By using her distinctive multiple exposure tecnique, she is currently working on portraiture project called Beyond The Self(ie), with the aim of representing individuals as creative microcosmoses, going beyond the layer of the mere physical representation, so overrated nowadays with selfies.