Diane Chappalley (b.1991, Switzerland, lives and work in London, UK) creates figurative landscapes in oil painting and ceramic sculptures, that draws on transitional experiences of death and birth, love and loss, trauma and resilience. Inspired by her personal history, the mysticism of the Swiss alps, classical sculptures and symbolism, her work is spiritual, psychological and explores our relationship with the earth.
She embraces the ability of painting to held multiple readings at once. Among washes of colours that suggest both soil and skin tones, the human figures are still, depicted with neutral colour and the raw linen left exposed, as if they are carved from stone; statues lost in time. Surrounded by flowers, who are layered and fast, captured in their state of becoming, they are a proposition of what once was, what is, and what can become. The hand build ceramics sculptures ‘Anxious Flowers’ are using the simple poetics of a fragile flower balancing on its own petals.
Chappalley plays with the ability of oil painting and ceramic to record human gestures through touch. Her work becomes a vehicle of intimacy; taking us through the porosity of inner and outer worlds.