Ioana Vrabie 's work explores the relationship between trauma, artistic practice and beauty, transforming unease into contemplation and escape into presence.
Her practice transforms the image into a space for healing and reconnecting with the body.
Through analog processes, multiple exposures and experimental techniques, Vrabie creates psychological landscapes and tactile jewel-pieces that are born from the dialogue between mind and matter, between observation and touch.
In her ongoing project Tactile Gaze, she expands this search by taking photography from the two-dimensional plane to three-dimensional space as a metaphor for the passage from dissociation to presence.
Born in Transylvania and raised in Tuscany, she lives in Barcelona. Trained at the University of the Arts London, after working in commercial and fashion photography, she now dedicates herself to artistic photography and research. Her works are held in private collections in Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, and Spain.
Her work has been recognized in international competitions such as the International Photography Awards (IPA), International Color Awards, Visual Art Open, Refocus Awards and the Bridgeman Studio Award, and published on platforms such as Artdoc.
Being part of the Agora Collective Mentorship Program for Experimental Projects has provided me with a framework of support and commitment to my creative process.
The program serves as a boost to shape and give continuity to personal projects, offering opportunities for review, dialogue, and presentation practice in a very inspiring and welcoming environment.
In my case, it has been an opportunity to consolidate Tactile Gaze within the context of experimental photography and prepare its public presentation, reflecting on how to share a process where photography ceases to be just an image to become matter and an experience of contact.
Highlight Project
Mirada Táctil
My work inhabits the threshold between photography, crafts, and meditation.
Through multiple film exposures and experimental processes such as phototransfer on metal and clay, I investigate the transition between image and matter, observation and sensation.
Mirada Táctil (Tactile Gaze), my current project, transforms photography into a sensitive object: the image ceases to be a window and becomes skin. Metal preserves the cold, precise imprint; clay, on the other hand, welcomes and deforms it with the warmth of the hands.
Each piece of jewelry is a small poetic archive that encapsulates memory, texture, and presence.
The project explores how light and memory can be felt with the hands, not just the eyes, and how artistic practice can function as active meditation and a process of repairing the link between body, mind, and reality.