MIA KOKKONI
GreeceMia Kokkoni was born in Greece and studied at Glasgow School of Art, where she has continued to live since graduating in 2022. Mia’s paintings connect to a world of storytelling that suggests folk tales and a kind of wistful nostalgia. Painted drily in muted tones, the paintings have an ambiguous quality – they are immediately recognisable and yet also otherworldly. A shuffling cast of characters (solitary women, dancing girls, figures leading horses) simultaneously seem to belong within the paintings and yet question how they got there.
The landscape she depicts is a hybrid of Kokkoni’s immediate experience. Fuelled by the rolling hills and clouds of her adopted Scottish home and yet peppered by clues of her past in the form of a Cypriot tree or Mediterranean flora and fauna. Her paintings describe an an imaginary land – but one that is rooted in Scottishness.
This conjured place suggests a kind of contradictory Celtic dreamscape with an unreliable sense of time and place, somehow heightened by the almost antique and slightly wonky nature of her home-made wooden frames. And yet, for all the apparent idiosyncrasy of her subject matter, Kokkoni’s paintings themselves are wholly authentic objects, marked by a truthful touch and a totally honest approach to picture making.
Courtesy Ingleby
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