About Me
Im Mia, a mixed media artist influenced by graphic media of the past and present. Orginally from Manchester and now Edinburgh based i explore multiple mediums and ways of creating an image, in particular using collage and painting but also screenprinting, publication and photography.
'The Cat' Project Overview and Statement
Throughout childhood animals became a key part of my development and growth. As I grew up I realised “these animals
are less than I believed” (Berger,2009). They did not walk around on two legs, they did not wear clothes, they were not like
me. Instead, they were behind bars and represented something a child would deem as uninteresting.
My work interrogates the cultural desensitisation to animals that arises through their anthropomorphic portrayals in media.
I explore the anthropomorphic animal characters included within the comics of the past. By collaging and
decontextualising familiar visual tropes, I expose how simplified and humanised figures reflect and distort our relationship
with animals.
Through collaging, screen printing and physical media in combination with painting, I manipulate images from vintage
comics; playing on panel style compositions and interactions between mediums. Instead of presenting their cheerful
exaggerated characters as forms of entertainment, I use the images as a mode of displacement and distortion. These
characters originally used to amuse, sell and simplify, become modes of exploration of how animals have been stripped of
their complexity and wildness within media. My painted depictions reclaim these images, reanimating and layering them
within painterly expressive mark making, restoring a sense of physicality and natural instinct the illustrations dismissed.
My work exists in the realm between nostalgia and critique challenging audiences to consider how recurring images
within media of anthropomorphic animals has desensitised us to the realities of animal’s futures. Reducing them down to
symbols, marketing ploys and projections of ourselves. By using screen print I distort and place these images in a space
between graphics and fine art. Through my combination of painted depictions and flattened screen prints, I create a
conflicting relationship to establish a sense of unease and tension forcing viewers to confront their own relationship with
the natural world and how media may have affected this.
