Rafaela de Ascanio

Rafaela de Ascanio is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture and immersive installation, with the female figure at the centre of her practice. Her work connects ancient representations of women as gods, priestesses and queens with the complex realities of womanhood today, exploring identity, memory, materiality and collective storytelling. Working primarily with clay and painting, she draws on ancestral processes of making and the lived experiences of women. Influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, de Ascanio approaches her practice as a way of gathering and holding everyday women’s stories, transforming them into sculptures and paintings that create spaces for reflection, dialogue and connection.