Miranda Pissarides is an independent artist living and working in London. Her practice involves painting, sculpting and drawing. Miranda is intrigued with the space between painting and sculpture; her sculptural forms evolve from her paintings. She is interested in challenging the traditional conventions attached to painting and sculpture, and finds the tension between these art forms fascinating. Miranda Pissarides uses the conventions about the surface, frame and medium explored in Clement Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ (1961) as a boundary to work against. She loads her canvases with excess materials so that they can hardly stand, leading her to disregard the formal properties of painting and move towards a three-dimensional surface. She informs her exploration of the space between painting and sculpture with Julia Kristeva’s theories on the ‘abject’ as the ‘in-between’, a space of ambiguity and no distinction.

Handling raw materials gives Miranda a sense of control and tactility. Using raw pigments she makes her own paint so that she can achieve a specific colour palette. The result renders a visceral sensation that is a reflection of her interest with the internal ambiguity of the human body and mind. Materially she is drawn to the idea of something malleable being blocked, something molten which might petrify, crack, or rot; essentially, the ‘in-between’ state of solid and liquid.

Miranda Pissarides’ work aims to create an all-encompassing experience for the viewer rather than a simple visual-subjective one. Intense colours and voluptuous textures fuel a sense of desire and repulsion, referencing the excessive nature of contemporary consumerist society. She wants to bring together fragments of people, life, emotion, and matter, which result in a kind of explosion: a black hole of wonder, desire, lust and rot.

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