Cecilia Fiona’s Celestial Paintings Reveal a World in Metamorphosis

The mystical paintings of Cecilia Fiona (b. 1997, Denmark) create a universe which beckons the viewer to step into. The Danish artist’s use of natural pigments mixed with rabbit-skin glue results in ethereal paintings of glistening translucence—reminiscent of frescoes, a distant dream, or a portal to another galaxy. Fiona’s practice reveals a world in constant metamorphosis, where life is always in transformation: human beings morph into trees, hair grows or braids into the roots of a plant, and flowers blossom into the cosmos.

Fiona continually evolves her practice through her personal journey towards an increasingly dynamic, fluid view of the world. After a transformative experience living with shamans in the jungles of Peru, Fiona developed a lyrical painting style that reveals all living organisms as interconnected beings. Figures and landscapes merge into one another in delicately painted, Fauvist-like brushstrokes. Fiona’s luminous colour harmonies, which undulate between muted pastel hues and glowing earthy tones, reveal themselves as she paints, according to the artist’s sense of intuition. The otherworldly visions that unravel on her canvases are a manifestation of the artist’s subconscious.  

Fiona received her BA in Art History from the University of Copenhagen, and has recently completed a residency at El Castillete in Madrid, Spain. Fiona is represented by Vitrine Gallery (London/Basel) and Andersen’s Contemporary (Copenhagen), and her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and institutes including: The Reventlow-Museum, Lolland, DK; Grand Teatret, Copenhagen, DK; Gallery Q, Copenhagen, DK; Galleri Kant, Copenhagen, DK; VITRINE, Basel, CH; Anderson’s Contemporary, Copenhagen, DK; Annka Kultys, London, UK; Bricks Gallery, Copenhagen, DK; OTP Copenhagen, DK; Formation Gallery, København, DK; Marinaro Gallery, New York, US; The Hole Gallery, Los Angeles, US. Fiona is currently part of The Earth has music for those who listen at Sapling Gallery, London, UK, curated by Claudia Cheng.

What brought you into the art world? Do you have any memories from your childhood that drove you to become an artist?

To be honest, I have always felt like an outsider in the art world. I think the reason I paint—and in fact, why most painters become artists—is because we are all searching for answers to the questions that reside deep inside ourselves, answers that cannot be translated into words. When I paint, I’m trying to get closer to the mysteries of life I’m trying to understand and to reveal.

I grew up in a small village in the countryside with two writers as parents, so imagination and storytelling played a big role when growing up. As a child, when I had a dream or a nightmare, it was always taken seriously. It was never ‘just a dream’ but always carried a deeper meaning. Growing up, dreams were not just something happening in my mind. They were closely tied to my physical reality. Regarding imagination and dreams as something important that can affect or change our physical reality is a way of thinking that still plays an important part in my practice today. I’m very interested in how the stories we tell and the images we produce affect the way we perceive and navigate the world.  

It’s difficult to say what brought me into the art world because honestly I have been drawing and painting my whole life. However, I would say that my professional art story began two years ago when I decided to make a huge change in my medium from acrylic paint to rabbit-skin glue and pigments.

Your ethereal, dreamlike paintings are beautifully intricate, combining mythical imagery with flora and fauna that bloom amongst celestial beings. What do they convey?

I’m not completely sure, and that’s the reason why I’m painting—to search for answers. I think that’s where all art stems from: the curiosity for something unknown, as well as the urgent need to get closer to the mysteries of life in order to try to understand and to convey them.

Some of the questions I keep returning to are: Why do we keep separating things, or putting feelings and things into categories? How to find peace in an always transforming, moving, chaotic world? Is it possible to be and sense the world from a non-human perspective by becoming part of nature? Can I transform into something else? What is energy? How can we heal the world?

I see a lot of movement in my work, a lot of transformation. To me, movement means life, movement is life. I’m interested in exploring how we interact and engage with life. I like to describe my work as imaginative ecosystems, where nature and creatures are linked together and are evolving into new stages of life. When you pause and think about life, you realize everything is born, blossoms, and then it fades. Life is always in constant transformation. Believing in movement is also a tool for me to dissolve established dialectical and static categories, like man versus nature, woman versus man, dream versus reality, happiness versus sadness. Movement makes things connected and linked: I become you, and you become the soil that I lay down on. Movement is a tool to set things free—to imagine new ways of existence.

Cecilia Fiona, Returning the stars to the sky, 2022. Rabbit-skin glue and pigments on canvas. 50 x 50 cm.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Many different places! Quantum physics, ornaments, David Lynch movies, images of galaxies, sci-fi, dreams…At the moment, I am inspired by a book by Alexander Roob on alchemy and mysticism. Containing both scientific and religious imagery, the book conveys the transformation of beings and connectivity with the cosmos. I found this book by accident in a thrift-shop, and I felt an instant, intuitive connection with it. In the book’s images, you can truly sense how everything is constantly changing and transforming—never reaching a final position. This appeals to me a lot as I also see the world this way. It is in a constant mode of metamorphosis and movement, where no feeling or state is final.

This is also what painting is for me: a space where feelings, nature, humans, and the entire world can be linked and imagined in new ways of connectivity. Painting is a space for dissolving categories and creating new ecosystems.

Can you describe your creative process?

I usually draw an extremely rough black-and-white sketch in my sketchbook to create the composition of the work. The colours and further details arise in the process of painting. Nothing is sketched on the canvas before I start working. I just begin and follow my intuition.

I see my process of painting almost as an archaeological task. It is a dynamic, intuitive process. I start with a vision that feels like remembering a dream. It’s blurred at first, so I let intuition guide me until I reach the image. Painting is like removing all the dust and soil from that dream, and digging out the work from the canvas. This is how the work reveals itself to me.

Music is a ritual to me. There needs to be music when I start painting. I often listen to a specific curated music radio program called The Moth or Natsværmeren in Danish. It’s broadcasted around midnight so the mood of the music is very dreamy and sleepy. When I play this music, I feel like I’m entering a different space; it’s a way to get into the state of trance or dream I need to be in while painting. I always listen to music that is soft and fluid to get into a zone where I feel like I’m blending with the canvas and the materials. At the same time, it is a way of letting thoughts and feelings disappear to give way to a clear mind.

I see the very process of painting as non-verbal communication, perhaps even an emotional communication between me and the canvas. Sometimes the communication ends in a quarrel, and other times, we understand each other and merge. A bit like an unstable relationship with ups and downs, love and hate.

Cecilia Fiona, Embraced by flower-hands, 2022. Rabbit-skin glue and pigments on canvas. 79 x 90 cm.

You’ve created a unique technique for your practice–mixing handmade and natural pigments into the rabbit-skin glue to use as a paint. What inspired you to use this medium? 

Two years ago, I organised my own exhibition in my apartment in Copenhagen. A curator suggested I should try rabbit-skin glue and pigments, a very old technique preceding the use of oil paint. I was immediately intrigued and went to buy the materials, but at first, it didn’t work for me at all. For more than half a year I wasn’t able to paint anything because I couldn’t make the paint work. Rabbit-skin and natural pigments are extremely different from acrylics for two reasons. First, you cannot paint over an existing layer of paint or erase anything because the glue is super translucent and liquid. Second, since you are heating up the glue and mixing your pigments at the same time, it’s hard to find the right proportion for the mixture to work perfectly. It was honestly frustrating, but I never gave up, and this whole period ended up being extremely rewarding.

It was almost like a rebirth, because I had to forget everything I knew about painting and art and start from scratch. I think it somehow brought me closer to the story or the answers I’m searching for. Most importantly, it was a period of learning how to let go of people’s expectations of how you become a great artist, how you should paint, and how you should behave as a human being, etc. I learnt to let go of all expectations and norms, believe in your own intuition, and trust the path you are choosing.

I was delighted that you created ‘My face is yours’ (2022) for the show The Earth has music for those who listen that I curated for Sapling Gallery. What is the story behind this painting?  

To me, the painting is about giving back to the earth—letting go of your static subjectivity and melting together with the cosmos, transforming into the cosmos, into something bigger, something fluid.

In the painting, streams of energy are floating and sprouting. The work is about living and existing in a new way, letting go of old ideas, and transforming into something new. This is something I’m very interested in: imagining how life will evolve and has to evolve. The post-humanist Rossi Braidotti talks about nomadic subjectivity and how we must perceive ourselves as something always connected to our surroundings, always transforming and relational, and never as a static unit. Right now, there is an urgent need for humans to exist in a different way—to be more connected with nature and the world around us. But how do we do it?

I think the painting is also about being in the world without fear, finding peace in a chaotic, ever-changing world, and the paradoxes of wanting peace and letting go of our ego. We are human after all, and daily we are challenged by conflicting feelings, needs, wants, and dreams. Is it even possible to find peace?

The worlds in my painting could be the cosmos in a mythical world in an indefinable primeval time, or perhaps we are witnessing life in a distant future, in another galaxy. A future in which humans have evolved into a new species of bodiless faces while life sprouts, blossoms and fades around them.

Cecilia Fiona, My face is yours, 2022. Rabbit-skin glue and pigments on canvas. 110 x 110 cm.

What would be a dream project for you to work on?

I would love to work more with living sculptures and costumes, and develop the performance and sculptural part of my practice, which was part of my first solo with Andersen’s Contemporary in Copenhagen. It’s very interesting to see what happens when the mystical world in my paintings become more physical, when the world of fiction and reality meet through my three-dimensional works.  

A dream project would be to work on a bigger performance piece combining painting, sculpture, and dance/performance. I have always been interested in dance and how moving the body is a tool to transform it into something else. In my latest sculptural performance at Andersen’s Contemporary, the movements of the two performers were inspired by Tai Chi dance.

Are there any artists who have especially inspired you?

I have recently dived into the worlds of Hilma af Klint, Else Alfelt, Björk, and Inger Christensen—to name a few important influences on my practice. They are interesting to me because of the way they all explore nature as a living “something” essential for our existence. They all have a big focus on connectivity amongst ecosystems, and their works resonate with the way I see the world. They perceive the cosmos fluidly, and they dissolve the boundaries between our imagination and our physical reality, between nature and humans through their practices. They all seem to have access to a dreamlike dimension, consisting of rules only they know of, and as a result, their works are a mystery in this world, seeming as though they were not painted here. I can look at their works over and over again without getting closer to their secrets. That’s exciting—to be able to tell a story full of secrets and mysteries.