Janice Maria Mancini Ys (1987), The Netherlands

I am interested in the moment when a familiar image starts to become something else.

I often begin with something recognizable: a face, a body, a bird, a landscape, a fragment from art history. While working, I distort, cut apart and recombine these forms until their original identity starts to slip. A body can become meat, a bird can become a self-portrait, and an image can turn into something I did not intend to make.

This way of working comes from a fascination with the space between the conscious and the subconscious, the things we carry, but don’t always have words for. Recurring elements in my work include distorted faces, birds, sea and sky, and shifts between pink and blue. In series such asINNING (2026, (currently in development), BONING (2025) and BIRDEN (2025), I explore these forms more intuitively, allowing the image to develop through the act of making rather than starting with a fixed answer.

I work across painting, drawing, photography and digital media, using oil, acrylic, ink and Polychromos pencils alongside digital painting and 3D elements. I move between these mediums because the image itself tells me what it needs.

For me, the interesting part is what happens when an image stops behaving the way I expect it to.