Current Residents Paula Zvane
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Paula Zvane, Skeleton of a haystack, 2025
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Paula Zvane, Fur creatures from tactile sensitivity searies : installation view from "compose decompose" show 2025. Photo by Odie Lap Chun Chow
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Paula Zvane solo show INVISIBLE : installation view from Purvitis Prize show at Latvian National Museum of art, 2025 Photo by Kristine Madjare
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Paula Zvane , Tent, 2021 : installation view from Savvala/SAVAGE show Mushroom childs camp with Liene Rumpe
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Paula Zvane, Skin, performance 2021, Photo by Arnis Balčus
Paula Zvane is a Latvian artist working across sculpture, installation, and painting. Her practice centers on natural and bio-based materials, including kombucha leather, recycled fur, linen fibre, oils, organic residues, and pigments to explore memory, empathy, and ecological interdependence. She studied at the Art Academy of Latvia (BA) and holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London. Shown internationally, her work reimagines matter as hybrid, surreal, skin-like structures that engage contrasts of life and death, fragility or sturdiness. Through research-based experimentation, Zvane engages communities while investigating myths, cultural patterns, and material relationships between human and nonhuman worlds.
During my HIAP residency, I plan to continue researching sustainable biomaterials, focusing on kombucha leather, plant fibres, and natural hardening agents. I will explore their shifts between fragility and sturdiness, testing their potential as skin-like, fur-like, or structural forms by altering their aggregate states. Working on a larger scale, I will grow kombucha sheets, refine preservation methods, and develop hybrid sculptural surfaces using wood or steel. This research links material experimentation with ecological awareness, aiming to reveal the unfamiliar as visible rather than fearful, and to create new morphed creatures in sculpture and painting, such as turning fur into plants.