Meryl Yana is a London-based French artist and painter of elemental, near-sacred abstractions. A graduate from the Chelsea College of Arts, Yana has since completed residencies at JO-HS in Mexico City, the Museum of Goa, India, PADA in Barreiro and MONO in Lisbon. Yana’s works are each near-alchemic experiments, using natural ingredients like hibiscus, baking powder, lime, and conchinilla, to create soft, elemental movements on canvas.

Yana works in a harmonious uncertainty with her materials, allowing the laws of physics, chance and chaos to create shapes and patterns from transcend and transgress the bounds of human conception. In this way, she explores themes of the human condition, modernity and ancestry and sacred practices of elemental immersion.

Yana uses the process and principles of palimpsest, that is: something that has been repurposed or reformed, though retains its previous life and utility visible beneath. Here, her works speak to the uncovering, erasure  and layering processes of archaeological endeavour: exploring the worlds that have come before us.