Artist statement
Aisha Pagnes’s practice is driven by a sustained attempt to translate immediate experience into material form. Her work develops through direct engagement with matter, often using found or discarded materials that impose constraints on process and outcome. Although realised largely as painting, the approach is tactile and sculptural rather than pictorial.
Working in abstraction, she builds surfaces through repeated gestures of layering, stripping, heating, scorching, deliberately pushing material qualities—weight, drying time, opacity, fracture—until they shift state, and adjusting the work in response. When a surface becomes too fixed, it is destroyed and rebuilt. Each work is finished at the point where further action would collapse its structure, leaving visible the marks of negotiation rather than execution.
Subtle differences in density and texture emerge only through slow, dynamic looking. These are not decorative effects, but traces of pressure, repetition, and duration left in the material itself.