New York and Athens-based painter Ioanna Gouma was born in Athens in 1977. Her practice includes painting, mixed media, printmaking and ceramics. Her main body of work consists of drawings and monotypes on Japanese paper. In these series, dirt, dust, rotating sky organisms that inhabit the world, and molecular interactions, reveal their poetic forms. Multiple layers in each of her pieces - some nearly invisible to the naked eye – create a universe of their own, not only as a mirroring image of what is out there but of what is actually in here and what is yet-to-be, stating the porosity of the exterior and the interior world. Microcosm and macrocosm are coinciding, a multitude of narratives and visual stories. Her compositions stand as a site of controlled chaos. Everything seems properly misplaced emancipated from time itself. Likewise, her watercolors exist in a dream-like state creating a fleeting, weightless moment. The drawing process develops like automatic writing configured by impulse memory, the subconscious, observing nature and discovery. Gouma, lets her works create their own non-linear rules and rhythms like a complex personal diary without time frames. It is the archaeologist and the scientist most at resemblance here, with beyond-thorough research and meticulous observation. A reverse archaeology swapping the researcher’s order with the dreamer’s perspective, unearthing but also hiding stories and references.
The artist has exhibited widely since the early 2000s. Her work is in the collection of the Royal College of Art, London and numerous other public and private collections worldwide.
