As International Women’s Day approaches, we’re delighted to be bringing you three exclusive new limited edition prints from Marcelina Amelia – a Brighton-based artist known for diving into themes of self-acceptance, gender and female sexuality.
Just one glance at Amelia’s empowering oeuvre will show you how inspired she is by the strength, resilience and life-giving capacity of women. In this new selection of works, we see Amelia continue her exploration of motherhood, freedom and our capacity to heal.
In today’s blog, we’re chatting to Amelia to learn more about the various inspirations for these new works, and how her artistic journey and creative process has evolved over four transformational years.
Shop Marcelina Amelia artworks
Personal Touch
Marcelina Amelia is an artist who appears fearless when it comes to infusing her art with her personal experience of the world.
This new selection of limited edition prints hail from different collections, spanning different stages of Amelia’s artistic journey, and key periods in her journey through womanhood. She reveals:
“The last four years have been the most transformative for me, creatively, and because I became a mother. I could see and feel the transformation so intensely that it has been what I’ve been wanting to talk about and paint.”
“All of all my artworks are personal, but these three are particularly so. I’m excited that Enter Gallery wasn’t afraid to show something a little different from me.”
Divine Inspiration
Speaking to Amelia it seems that one vital element of her artistic development, and one that has had the most profound effect, has been learning to trust her instincts. This might seem like a simple enough concept, but it’s something that many of us, and innumerable artists, battle with.
The long and winding path towards learning to trust that voice is what Amelia explores in The Journey – one of her newest works, completed just weeks ago. The piece is inspired by a poem of the same name by New York Times bestselling author and poet, Mary Oliver.
While we all have an inner voice offering guidance, or urging us to explore artistic ideas, it’s not always easy to tune out the rest of the world to listen. Revealing more about her own journey towards this place of trust, Amelia reveals:
“At first, I couldn’t hear it, and then it was very quiet and then there were all of the layers of doubt and societal norms that you have to break through - past traumas and memories. It’s only then that you start hearing that voice more and more – and recently, I’ve really tapped into it.”
“Sometimes the ideas or thoughts I have make no sense at first, but I do them anyway, and in the end, I can see clearly the sense they make. In his book, The Creative Act, Rick Rubin speaks about not ignoring an idea if it’s ‘screaming to exist’. I’m learning to follow that inspiration without fearing it or questioning it, and the results can be incredible.”
Cowboy Sabbath
The Journey hails from Amelia’s new Wild Geese series but eagle-eyed Amelia fans might have spotted the cowboy symbolism that we’ve seen in previous popular works such as LA Dreams and Straw from the Shoes Protrudes (pictured below).
In her Cowboy Sabbath series, Amelia subverts the archetype of the cowboy, producing depictions of powerful women taking the reins of their own lives, as a metaphor for women’s strength. She reveals:
“These works are about creating space for women’s stories to be heard, which is something I feel very strongly about. I hope by creating images of powerful women, I’ll inspire myself and hopefully other women, to use their voices.”
Dreaming Rituals
The next artwork in this exclusive release is Healer. The artwork hails from the artist’s Dreaming Rituals series, created while Amelia was living back in Poland in 2021 and 2022.
Poland’s influence is clear to see across Amelia’s oeuvre – whether that’s via folklore woven into the narrative in pieces like, Superstitions, or in this instance, the religious iconography that permeates her work. Amelia explains.
“The Catholic imagery I grew up around has always inspired me, whether it’s the poses of my women, or elements that I feed into the paintings, such as the halo in Healer.”
Amelia is now living back in Brighton, but her time spent in Poland was a creatively inspiring and healing time. During these years, she cracked her practice wide open, setting up feminist art collective, Grupa Lono, and branching out into performance art, video, installation and community-based collaborative events.
Speaking of how this experimental period has influenced her artistic process, Amelia reveals:
“It brought more play to my practice. Doing new things and taking things to the extreme helped strip me of that artistic ego. I learnt to work collectively, allowing in mistakes and the influence of others.
That period was about opening my brain as much as possible. Hopefully, with time, and as I move forwards, I will be able to do that more and more, because really there are no limits other than the fear of being laughed at. If you can get past that that, then you can do anything.”
Motherhood in Art
The final piece in this exclusive release is Fountain – a work from Amelia’s Mamalia series (soon to be adapted into a book), in which she explores the creations, inspirations and frustrations of motherhood. Speaking about what draws her to the subject, she reveals:
“There is barely any representation of motherhood in art from a female perspective. What does exist is all via the male gaze, and their version is obviously very limited and not real to the female experience at all.
People still think negatively about female artists that are also mothers. As Hettie Judah says in her book, How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (And Other Parents) - for too long, artists have been told that they can’t have both motherhood and a successful career.”
Even Marcelina’s favourite artist Tracey Emin is famous for saying that it’s impossible to be both a mother and an artist. She believes you can only have one child and it’s art. Emin famously stated : "There are good artists that have children. Of course, there are. They are called men. It’s hard for women.”
Amelia continues:
“To me, this historically has been proven true but is an outdated vision because women are so capable, multi-faceted and diverse. It’s like Hettie Judah argues, ‘a paradigm shift is needed within the art world to take account of the needs of artist mothers, and other parents.’
I feel like just the sheer fact of talking about it and sharing those sometimes domestic and usually invisible experiences can feel radical and liberating, and hopefully make a big chunk of the population feel seen.
We’re much bigger than this small idea of what women can and can’t do and what motherhood means. There’s a real battle within me about whether or not to create work that covers the topic of motherhood but it’s such a universal subject and a powerful metaphor for so many things – earth, nature, the universe. I’m proud to be a mother and an artist, and I won’t let preconceptions of what art is stop me from creating the art I want to.”