EASTBOURNE.- Towner Eastbourne is presenting Spirals Gathering, Time Breathing, Cecilia Fiona’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK.
Danish artist Cecilia Fiona is based in Copenhagen and works across painting, costume, performance and sculpture. Her practice is concerned with imagining and exploring the interconnected relationship between the body, the earth and the cosmos. From the microscopic realm of atoms and cells to the vast cosmic scale of the universe, Fiona envisages the movement and flow of energy through all things, picturing the universe as one vast living organism.
Spirals Gathering, Time Breathing features new paintings, sculptural installations and a sound piece made in collaboration with Lucie Cure. In this new body of work, Fiona creates extraordinary dreamlike imagery: bodies and beings dissolve into ribbons, roots and tendrils, looping and weaving in cycles of creation and destruction, metamorphosis and regeneration. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as human and plant biology, Norse mythology and quantum physics, she works intuitively, ‘bringing the inner world out’.
Fiona’s sculptural installation Spirals Gathering, Time Breathing (2026) forms the centrepiece of the exhibition. Suspended from the ceiling, a circular canopy of hand-painted jute spanning four metres in diameter evokes the body or bell of a jellyfish. Plaited sisal strands descend towards the floor, surrounding a dead tree at the centre of the artwork. This extraordinary installation references the immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, and Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life in Norse mythology. Echoing themes of metamorphosis and regeneration, the aptly named immortal jellyfish is a tiny sea creature capable of reversing its own life cycle, while the legendary Yggdrasil is associated with life, death and the continuity of the cosmos. As Fiona describes it:
‘Branches become tentacles, tentacles become roots, and hybrid bodies seem to be growing and dissolving at the same time. Throughout the installation, life and death appear not as opposites but as part of the same movement. The suspended creature hovers somewhere between organism, landscape and cosmos, as if the universe itself were a living body gathering spirals and breathing time.’
Two exquisite large-scale paintings, Birth and Black Holes (2026) and The Butterfly Between Worlds (2026), have been created for the exhibition at Towner. These paintings explore dualities of creation and destruction, beginning and ending, generation and dissolution, the microscopic and cosmic.
Birth and Black Holes, continues Fiona’s interest in the creative and destructive potential of spiral movement. When a human egg is fertilised, proteins inside the cell create spiralling waves across its surface, initiating the processes that allow new life to emerge. The title of this painting also references black holes which draw matter towards them in a violent inward spiral.
One of the greatest symbols of metamorphosis, a luminous butterfly features in The Butterfly Between Worlds. Through its translucent wings, an otherworldly figure appears, carrying a face whose eye releases flowering branches that descend into oval-shaped lakes. Across both paintings, boundaries between body, landscape and cosmos remain unstable. Fiona’s paintings are drawn from her imagination; each one begins with a rudimentary sketch on paper before Fiona starts painting directly onto canvas. Using a fine brush, she builds intricate organic networks across the surface, while universes of interweaving forms fill the space of the canvas like lacework.
In the sculptural installation Questions from a Seed (2026), two trumpet-shaped cones hang from the ceiling with their flared openings facing one another, ‘like parallel worlds suspended in dialogue’. The work draws inspiration from entanglement, a phenomenon observed in quantum physics in which two or more particles remain inextricably linked, regardless of distance. Music emanates from seedlike forms at the centre of the installation. Fiona imagines these forms as seeds, stars, atoms or even souls, ‘calling and singing to one another across an unseen distance.’
Cecilia Fiona worked with singer and composer Lucie Cure to develop methods for translating painting into sound during a residency project called ‘Painting the Unheard’ at Sort/Hvid Stage in Copenhagen. Fiona’s painting A Sun is an Atom, a Womb is an Ocean (Now What Am I?) (2025) was transformed into a musical score. The voices resonating through the installation are therefore the sound of this painting taking on a new form.
Cecilia Fiona is the fourth artist to present work in Towner’s ground-floor Gallery 1 in a series of free solo exhibitions supported by the Towner Emerging Artist Fund. Curated by Towner’s Exhibitions and Offsite Curator Noelle Collins, this programme highlights exceptional contemporary artists working locally, nationally and internationally.
Cecilia Fiona (b. 1997 in Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Fiona works across sculpture, painting, costume, and performance creating an interconnected ecosystem where each medium evolves from the other. Her ritual-like performances give physical form to the creatures in her paintings, while her sculptures expand the worlds depicted in her visual works.
Working with the traditional process of rabbit-skin glue and pigments in her painting lends her work a unique texture and translucent quality. Over the past three years, Fiona has also produced sculptures and large-scale sculptural installations using natural materials including recycled paper pulp, shellac, latex, jute and sisal. Fiona brings two costumes from the series What a joy to live above and below all at once (2024-2025) to the exhibition at Towner. Each costume is a unique three dimensional painting, worn in live performance and/or presented for the duration of an exhibition.
In April 2025, Fiona presented Ghost Flower Ritual at Copenhagen Contemporary, a multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artwork made in collaboration with composer Sophie Søs Meyer and performed by musicians from Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen.
She has exhibited internationally in group exhibitions including And I Become a River, Whose Brown Tongue Will Not Rest at La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain), Iter Subterraneum at Bergen Kunsthall (Bergen, Norway), Weaving Cosmologies at Skaftfell Art Center (Seyðisfjörður, Iceland), Smittet af Bacillen at HEART Museum (Herning, Denmark) and A Poem Lovely as a Tree at SIXI Museum (Nanjing, China). In 2024, Fiona participated in the Speculative Ecologies Lab Verde Residency, developed in collaboration with the National Institute of Amazonian Research in the Brazilian Amazon, and presented work at HEART Museum (Herning, Denmark).
Cecilia Fiona is represented by Niru Ratnam Gallery, London, and Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen.
