THE SIT DOWN
16: GEORGIA GHAZNAVI
Much of her work since has been about the processing of visual information, about what happens when you look at something complex without the vocabulary to explain it. She began at Chelsea College of Arts painting abstractly, moved into characters set against distorted engine backgrounds, then noticed the world-building behind the figures had become more interesting than the figures themselves.
The years between her BA and the Royal College were spent painting alone. She worked full time, kept a studio in Tottenham surrounded by sculptors and printmakers with no other painters in the building, and had little sense of what she was working towards. She applied to the MA in Painting at the RCA, mostly on impulse, and got in — graduating in 2024 with the Colarts Bursary.
Her process now begins with a deliberate surrender of control. She paints absent-mindedly at the start, sometimes with her eyes closed, sometimes with the studio lights switched off, pouring and letting things happen without deciding what they should become. Layer follows layer, in oil over an acrylic underpainting to keep things moving, with multiple canvases going at once so nothing has to be rushed. Only towards the end does her conscious hand take over, choosing what to draw out and what to bury. She knows a painting is finished when she stops seeing things in it. Namely when everything that needed to emerge has emerged, and everything that needed to go has gone.
That rhythm of disruption and settling runs through the subject matter too. Her current work, and the first she has thought of as a series, takes ponds and fish tanks as its starting point, feeding into a related body of paintings around orchids after one pond composition began resembling a flower. She talks about building an aquarium as the closest analogy to her practice: substrate goes in, water is added, everything swirls into chaos before it settles, then the fish disturb it again. It’s a system that only holds through constant negotiation. She describes wanting the same disorder in the paintings that exists in the world outside them, think of flowers trampled and regrowing, order arrived at through repeated ruin, she says.
Scale matters to her; she works large by preference, and finds she cannot work small without also working big, though the small paintings feed something useful back into the large ones. Her most recent show was in London, with earlier work shown in Greece and Dubai, and the year ahead is deliberately studio-bound, where you’ll find her painting, layering, and then disrupting; waiting for things to settle before disturbing them again.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
My practice is primarily a way for me to process images that stick in my mind. I approach this in the way I feel the world works, in a constant state of chaos and calm. I flick between the two opposing methods, disrupting and restoring until I have created a vision close to a fever dream.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
My work is influenced by pockets of situations and happenings in the world. I am less concerned with representing an object as a singular, static image and more interested in the cycles that make them. I translate this continual process into my paintings, recreating the environment as well as the subject.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
I would like the paintings to require time and attention, so the act of looking and understanding the image reflects my process.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
I would have dinner with Charles Jencks.