BIO
ELIZA BONO
Art has been part of my life since childhood, although the path towards developing my own artistic practice has been anything but straightforward. My grandfather was a sculptor who worked in wood, metal and stone, while my father was a skilled artistic woodworker who made furniture, wooden toys and other objects. I grew up surrounded by people for whom making things by hand, understanding materials and giving them form were entirely natural.
As a child, I drew constantly and later began to paint. Horses were another great fascination, and that early connection with animals and the natural world has never really left me. It continues to surface throughout my work, often in very different and unexpected forms.
Photography entered my life later. I began photographing people and nature intensively, initially with an analogue SLR camera, and in 2004 my photographs were shown in my first exhibitions in Poland. I went on to study at the Warsaw School of Photography, developing my technical skills and visual approach, and for a time worked as a freelance photographer. Photography taught me, above all, how to look: how to frame consciously, work with light and composition, notice detail, and understand the relationship between a figure and the space around it.
After moving to Sweden in 2013, art temporarily receded into the background as work, family life and everyday responsibilities took precedence. The need to create, however, never entirely disappeared.
A turning point came in 2019, during two months spent with my then teenage daughter in the mountains of Spain. We stayed in an isolated house without running water or electricity. In the evenings, by candlelight, we drew, talked, and had something that had been missing from my life for a long time: time itself. It was there that I began painting again. Surreal and fairy-tale figures started to emerge, and with them came the realisation that art could no longer remain something indefinitely postponed until “later”.
Painting once again became an important part of my life, but eventually I found myself wanting to move beyond the flat surface. I wanted to see the figures and forms that had previously existed on canvas or paper inhabit physical space.
In 2023, I took my first sculpture course, working with papier-mâché. Sculpture opened up an entirely new range of possibilities and quickly became an important part of my practice. Later that same year, I began studying at Kävesta Folkhögskola in Sweden, where I went on to complete an Advanced Year in Interdisciplinary Art. This period focused on independent artistic practice, developing my own visual language and making increasingly conscious decisions about the direction of my work. I concentrated primarily on painting, sculpture and ceramic sculpture, developing individual projects and exploring the possibilities of form and material.
Sculpture did not replace painting or drawing. Today, I no longer think of different disciplines as separate chapters in my development. Drawing, painting, sculpture and my experience of photography are all part of the same visual language, and I move between them according to the idea and the particular demands of each work.
My current practice centres largely on sculpture, painting and drawing. In my sculptural work, I use clay, papier-mâché, wood, metal and mixed media, while my growing interest in relief, large-scale sculpture and spatial work continues to expand the way I think about form. I enjoy bringing together materials and techniques that may not, at first, seem like obvious companions.
I have little interest in committing myself to a single technique or material. I tend to begin with an idea and then search for the most appropriate way to give it physical form. Sometimes that means working with something familiar; at other times, it requires learning an entirely new skill. Experimentation, trial and error, unexpected problems and the search for solutions are all integral to the way I work.
Nature remains the most enduring source of inspiration in my practice. I am fascinated by it at every scale: the human and animal body, plants and marine organisms, as well as the structures, surfaces, patterns and rhythms found throughout the natural world.
These observations come together in my work with mythology, old fairy tales, dreams, memory and imagination. From that encounter emerge figures and worlds that no longer belong entirely to reality. A human body may merge with an animal; a familiar form may transform into something unexpected; something beautiful may simultaneously become strange, unsettling or difficult to define.
I am particularly interested in that moment when the viewer recognises what they are looking at, yet senses that it cannot be entirely named or placed.
I am not searching for a single definitive technique or a style in which to remain forever. I want my practice to retain the freedom to change, experiment, learn and take on increasingly ambitious work.
My work continues to evolve somewhere between nature and imagination, figuration and transformation, the familiar and the unexpected. It is this territory in between that interests me most.