visual artist
Paula Zvane’s practice investigates the fluid boundaries between beings, materials, and environments. Through processes of mirroring, mimicry, and hybridization, she develops creatures, symbols, and speculative visual languages that move across animal, plant, and material realms. Her works stage encounters where emotional states - horror, tenderness, attraction, or intimacy - surface within unexpected bodies and substances.
Working across sculpture, drawing, and painting, Zvane constructs surreal environments in which forms appear to merge, mutate, or exchange qualities. Metals, furs, oils, and fabrics become active participants within these transformations, carrying emotional charge and suggesting new relations between organic and inorganic matter. She is continually occupied with questioning how materials can become emotional, how their aggregate states might shift, and how one form can transform into another.
By blending and reconfiguring forms drawn from nature, Zvane destabilizes hierarchical distinctions between species and substances. Her practice proposes a speculative ecology in which human, animal, plant, and material worlds coexist on equal ground. Within these hybrid ecosystems, difference becomes a site of connection rather than separation, allowing empathy and unity to emerge between entities that might otherwise appear foreign to one another.
Zvane holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Painting Department of the Art Academy of Latvia and graduated in 2023 from the Fine Art Master’s programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. In 2021, she was awarded the Cecil Lewis Art Award in Sculpture from art collector Cathy Wills. In 2025, she was shortlisted for the Purvītis Prize and presented her first solo exhibition Invisible at the Latvian National Museum of Art.
Her work extends through international exhibitions and residencies, including Guts Gallery,London, where she presented works involving flax hair lace. Periods of study and production in Iceland, in collaboration with the Reykjavík Association of Sculptors, have informed her engagement with landscape, material processes, and performative installation. Zvane participated in the Helsinki International Artist Residency (HIAP) 2026, where her research focused on kombucha scoby as a potential environmentally friendly sculptural material.
