On my way to meet Alicia Paz on a hot morning in late June, Preston seemed to be cast in magic realism, as though priming me for the artist’s fixations with fantastical, beguiling imagery. At the end of a dark, narrow alley on a street lined with fast food shops and student pubs, I glimpsed a tiny shrine to the Virgin Mary: in such an incongruous, anachronistic setting, its presence seemed miraculous. On the next road, a field of wildflowers enveloped a modern block of flats, blooms so densely packed they carpeted the ground in shimmering, jewel-toned stalks and stems. In both instances, I had to look and look again, seeking validation from passersby that what I was seeing was real and not the hallucinatory visions of an over-travelled, sleep-deprived writer. On meeting the artist and looking at her experiments in print, my encounters en route to the studios seemed entirely fitting — a portent for things to come. Paz’s works, some completed, some in fragments, were strange, shimmering, mutable forms, as though the images were conjured from memory — part-seen, part-imagined.
Born in Mexico, Paz studied in the USA, France and the UK. Though she has been based in London for over two decades, she has maintained an international perspective and profile, exhibiting work across continents, from Argentina and Mexico to Germany, France and across the UK. Though she works across media, Paz is primarily a painter, best known for her work in that medium, and for her use of collaging or reconfiguring existing and found imagery drawn from a diverse array of sources in art history and visual culture. Amongst many other activities, in the last six years or so she has undertaken residencies at Museo Leonora Carrington in San Luis Potosí, Mexico and S1 Artspace / Chatsworth, held solo exhibitions at Maison de I’Amérique Latine in Paris (Juntas, 2022), Beecroft Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, and Visual Arts Centre, North Lincolnshire, and has participated in group exhibitions including Le Cabaret du Néant, FRAC Ile de France, Château de Rentilly. According to her website statements, and in recent catalogue essays and interviews (including my own conversation with her) Paz has emphasised her interest in the female figure, and in fusing the figure with organic life to create ‘amphibian or plant-like figures “weeping” pigment’, ‘mud-caked and dripping, as if extracted from a colourful, post-cognitive swamp’. Her titles attest to this interest in water and women, such as her 2017 public sculpture ‘Insel der Puppen (Island of Dolls)’ (2017) at Magdeburg in Germany, or the recent exhibitions Río y Mar (River and Sea) (Beecroft Gallery, 2021) and River Makers (2020-21, Visual Arts Centre, North Lincolnshire). Earlier works include her Trees series (2008), populated by Medusa figures, witches, tree-women, and other unsettling fantasies.
She is the latest in a succession of artists who have undertaken the Women in Print Residency at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios (ACPS) at the University of Central Lancashire, an initiative led by artists and Research Fellows Tracy Hill and Magda Stawarska. Describing itself as practice research hub ‘for incubating ideas and methods’ established to ‘developing innovative thinking about printmaking as a fine art discipline’, it has hosted over ten artists since it began in 2022, including Helen Cammock, Emily Speed, Lubaina Himid and Sana Obaid. Principally a painter, Alicia Paz has long been open to experimentation with sculpture, photography and other practices. As such, the ACPS residency represented an opportunity for her to develop skills in printmaking with the guidance and support of Tracy Hill and the research technicians, to see if, where and how printmaking could be used to realise her ideas.
For Paz, while some of the processes, techniques and materials that are central to her practice may have changed, the central ideas, themes and motifs which characterise her practice recur here across a range of printerly experimentations. For an artist who has been drawn to wetness in theme and material – the fluidity of water and paint, bodies in and of water, for instance – the process of soaking paper before printmaking was immediately apposite, a melding of medium and message. As we spoke, the alignment of theme and method struck us both and she noted, laughing, that ‘paper goes swimming’ before an etching can be made. Some of her early experiments in Preston had come about through intuitive or serendipitous encounters with everyday objects and materials that just happened to be in the studio, such as discarded packaging, string or rags.
In email exchanges before my studio visit Paz wrote of her plans for the residency: she hoped to pursue ideas developed in her work over the last decade or so, concocting hybrid half-human, half-animal or plant creatures, turning her attention this time to reinterpretations of mermaids in transnational history and culture. When I visited her at the studio, these ‘imaginary, recombined fishy beings’ were in development, with pieces of what will become larger, figurative, sculptural works laid out as numbered sections which will become a mermaid ‘family’. Using the reverse side of Tetra Pak containers, those ubiquitous tetrahedron-shaped cartons used for liquids like milk or juice, Paz has made approximations of silver-toned fish scales. As well as using the surface of the Tetra Pak as the printing ‘plate’, the packaging itself has been cut out into fan-shaped ‘scales’, as though when overlapped and interlaced they might make up a fragile suit of chainmail or a monumental mermaid’s tail. Laid out on a table, it was easy to envisage these tessellated, numbered forms proliferating to become life-size. They brought to mind the hybridized half-human, half-fish characters which populated Victorian designer William Burges’s 1878 drawings for the Marquess of Bute’s dinner service, as though they had sprung, animated, from the plate. In Paz’s Tetra Pak works, some of these scale-shapes are left plain, others printed with patterned and ornamented ‘lacy’ floral motifs, the outlines of maps, a shoal of fish or sinewy, seaweedy lines. The coolly varied metallic tones of the inside of the recycled packaging on which these images are printed adds to the watery ambience of Paz’s work: the way light plays on the surface, the sense of movement underwater.
For now, this is a body in pieces, yet to be assembled. When it is complete, it may take the form of a static sculpture, a life-sized female creature, or Paz may choose to animate her mermaid, in which case these sections will form a costume and her central mermaid will be choreographed or performed. Either way, a core intention is to invert the image of the mermaid as the mute, tragic heroine of Hans Christian Anderson’s 1837 tale The Little Mermaid and present an altogether more empowered, dangerous and spectacular being, one with cross-cultural, linguistic agency. Paz isn’t sure yet how this will be accomplished but is thinking of using speech bubbles or integrating found text into the images which are themselves composites or collages of existing sources – found images of fish, maps, flowers from visual culture or figures drawn from art historical sources.
As well as looking at recent works and works-in-progress during my visit, some of our conversation focussed on Paz’s broader research for the project, including literary and theoretical sources such as the American feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s now iconic semi-autobiographical work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), renowned for its attention to the idea of border-crossing identity and cultural hybridity, and rich use of metaphor and visual imagery across hybridised forms of writing. Here, Anzaldúa’s work speaks to Paz’s interest in liminal geographies, cross-cultural reciprocity and transnational identity. Of particular resonance is Anzaldúa’s bilingual code-switching throughout the book — those instances where culture, language or experience are untranslatable, those moments where narratives collide or are disjointed. The artist’s interest in the genre-bending form and style of Anzaldúa’s work, combining poetry, prose, autobiography, socio-political analysis and so on, finds a parallel in Paz’s own interest in the collage and montage of sources, of bringing together myths, figures and archetypes that are not easily contained or defined.
Fiction also underpinned part of Paz’s research process for this body of work. Some of her reading included novels such as Trinidadian-British writer Monique Roffey’s 2020 The Mermaid of Black Conch. Roffey’s Caribbean mermaid, in contrast to the tragic heroines of many European folktales, is a transgressive, fishy-smelling, visceral mermaid, with an energy Paz seems interested in echoing in her own strange mermaid family. Another watery influence was Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish, the 2001 novel by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan, a fictionalised account of the nineteenth century painter William Buelow Gould’s life as a convict in Van Diemen’s Land. Gould’s images of fish underpin the novel, drawn from his c.1832 Sketchbook of Fishes.
In terms of theoretical contexts, Paz has had an enduring interest in Luce Irigaray’s 1974 Speculum of the Other Woman and Mira Schor’s 1997 Wet: On Painting, Feminism, And Art Culture. Following these texts, her aesthetic – embracing, as it does, pattern, ornament, decoration and organic forms culturally coded as feminine, fluid and amorphous – seems shot through both formally and conceptually by the flowing, curvilinear forms of Art Nouveau, both diffusely and implicitly.
In keeping with this, much of Paz’s visual source material references nineteenth and early twentieth century art and visual culture, both in the Tetra Pak images and in a series of works on paper which meld women and fish, collaging images drawn from nineteenth century fine art printmaking with vintage zoological illustration from the early twentieth century. In aquatic shades of blue from Prussian to azure, cobalt to sapphire and cerulean, sinuous female figures emerge from the bodies of human-sized fish. In each case, the upper body is that of a woman, typically engaged in reading, dancing or other intellectual or creative pursuits. For some of these, Paz has looked to the work of Honoré Daumier’s lithograph series Les Bas-Bleus (1844)and Les Femmes Socialistes (1849) which satirised intellectual ‘bluestocking’ or socialist women. While those works were intended to be scornful and pejorative, Paz’s fish-women are curiously serene and beautiful, not the monstrous feminine of Daumier’s imagination. In spite of this, and regardless of their historical distance, there are affinities between the two artists in terms of their subject matter, however differently each treat their protagonists. In Daumier’s 1841 lithograph ‘Les Baigneurs, No. 21’, two women, one tall and thin, one short and stocky, compare their contrasting physique in the bath house: the accompanying text reads: ‘Seeing us (swim) one would swear we were two fish… a carp and an eel.’
In the test prints Paz showed me in the studio, the figures in her studies appeared to be submerged beneath a veil of waves or clouds, fluid, indistinct forms not dissimilar (to me, at least) to the inky stains and spillages of Victor Hugo’s drawings, an artist similarly preoccupied with seascapes and creatures from the deep, such as his Octopus of 1866–69. Elsewhere, while some of Paz’s approach to the use of found imagery, collage or montage lends itself to comparisons with Surrealism, a movement Paz has implicitly referenced in past works (the juxtaposition of high and low or the incongruous pairing of the quotidian and bizarre, for instance) her work feels to me more akin to Symbolism in the subtle, unsettling strangeness it elicits in the viewer. If she has an indirect relationship with Surrealist art (she has cited fellow British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington as a point of reference), it is to those women who, until recently, were regarded as peripheral figures, such as the anthropomorphic landscapes and tree-women of English painter Marion Adnams. In other works from Paz’s print experiments, outlines of women based on photographs of performers in the Bauhaus Triadic Ballet and the Loheland women’s settlement, end in a spiny fish tails below the ballet skirt, highlighting the artist’s interest in object theatre, gesture, performance and choreography.
To show me one final work produced before my visit, Paz unwrapped a large-scale monochrome print depicting a figure based on classical Greek statuary. The source image, an androgynous-looking woman in a classical tunic whose features are here inkily obscured, was too large to fit within the frame. So, in the way that the broken busts of neoclassicism were based on the broken or ruined remnants of antiquity, Paz has included the figure’s forearm as a disembodied fragment hovering above the woman’s shoulder. In this gesture, one arm amputated, the other reaching up and out, the woman appears to be attempting to catch her own arm, as though it has been thrown to her from beyond the frame, an uncanny, somewhat sinister vision. In its sketchy detail, it could be a negative or silhouette, murkily and messily rendered, enigmatic in its blankness. Paz is interested in ghost prints, in works that could be deemed, technically, to have failed, but that offer a glimpse of an image between absence and presence. This work carries with it some of these qualities, though how it relates to the others Paz has created remains to be seen. Will she include her Grecian figure amongst the mermaid tribe, a foreboding, silent presence looking on from the sidelines, or will she become central to her vision, another character in her cast? Mermaids are thought to have originated in the sirens of Greek mythology: perhaps this statuesque form has been lured into being by Paz’s sea-creatures?
Paz has approached her residency with a playful inventiveness in terms of materials, an ethos which is reflected in the eclecticism of her visual references and source material. She has used rags, found materials, drinks packaging and other detritus to call forth her glamorous grotesques. In a number of prints, she has inked-up string with a view to using it as a proxy for the long, tangled hair of her sea-creatures. As standalone abstractions, they are arresting in their own right, and it will be intriguing to see how the artist combines the various elements we looked at together as works-in-progress, if these works are exhibited as a group. It is clear that Paz has relished the creative freedom of this residency – her material resourcefulness has been supported and encouraged by the expertise and technical know-how of staff at ACPS and it seems as though the test and experimental works have become generative, each leading to further prints, stimulating new ideas toward the development of a resolved body of work. In searching for ways to blend oppositions, cross boundaries and borders, Paz has said that she is ‘forever looking for strangeness’ in her work. Fusing human and animal, when her multiple, mutable ‘women in print’ come to life, dripping, encrusted, keening, it will be strange indeed.
This exploration was informed by conversations with Alicia Paz, part of a series of written responses to the Women in Print artist residencies at Artlab Contemporary Printmaking Studio, UCLan, Preston. www.artlabcontemporaryprint.org.uk
Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic. She is Professor of Art History and Criticism at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University.
This exploration is supported by UCLan.
Published 30.07.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
2,630 words
