Beatrice Sike Oleniuc - BA (Hons) Fine Art
My work explores the fluid relationship between form, body, and consciousness through oil painting. The organic, ever-shifting figures I create reflect the experience of what it feels like to inhabit a body, shaped by the distortions of body dysmorphia and the broader human condition. . I create a visual tension through fragmentation , by manipulating paint to evoke what’s most familiar to us : skin and flesh. For me , the canvas becomes a psychological space , an emotional residue—where my emotional states are intuitively translated into these forms . My compositions resist stillness, they exist in a constant state of metamorphosis, conscious of both their present state and their potential of becoming. Each painting feels like a conversation—between myself and the canvas. It’s an intuitive, evolving dialogue where I respond to marks, colors, and gestures as they appear. I rarely begin with a fixed image in mind. Instead, I allow the work to unfold through emotional and physical instinct, letting the canvas guide me as much as I guide it. This exchange becomes a space for reflection, vulnerability, and discovery.
I want to reclaim and disrupt the narrative around how women’s bodies are seen. By fragmenting and abstracting the figure, I remove it from the realm of objectification and instead present it as a site of raw emotion, instability, and transformation. These figures are not meant to be consumed in the traditional sense of nudity—they confront, dissolve, and resist. They are not passive but expressive, refusing containment. I’m not simply reimagining how the body can be painted, but how it can be seen by my viewers. The ‘bodies’ in my paintings leak, dissolve, mutate, and reform. I want them to blur the boundaries between physical and emotional states . This allows me to explore the body not as a fixed object but as a porous vessel of memory, sensation, and instability. As a result, my work lives in an in-between space—fragmented yet alive, constantly becoming, and never fully resolved, much like the human experience itself.
