Barbara Kacic Daillant

I am a French-Croatian multidisciplinary artist working with painting, etching, and photography.

My practice is divided between two approaches. In my painting and etching work, I explore personal experience through surreal and often body-based imagery. I use elements of body horror and transformation to express internal psychological states that are difficult to describe in direct terms. These works focus on the instability of the body and the mind, and how distress can change how we see ourselves. This directly links to my work on feminist horror and the grotesque, as I believe my experience as a woman directly feeds my ideology and the way I seek to represent it through painting.

In contrast, my photography is outward-facing. It documents what I want to see in the world: solidarity, collective action, and justice. I mainly work with documentary photography, focusing on protests and public gatherings across Europe. These images reflect moments of resistance and people coming together in shared purpose.

Across all mediums, I am interested in how internal experience and external reality affect one another, and how images can hold both personal and political meaning.

Gills, a third eyelid, and a gaping shark jaw emerge within human anatomy, interrupting and reconfiguring the body. Naval mines transform into a face that appears to choke on the very object it is becoming. A hammerhead shark floats alongside a woman in a dense black mass, while suspended shark tails surround a pair of human legs. In one image, a self-portrait binds my body to a shark.

In this series of paintings, drawings, and etchings, I chose to combine wildlife painting with feminist horror imagery. The feminine grotesque often examines the way female bodies are culturally constructed as frightening or even disgusting when they exceed social boundaries. Things like menstruation, pregnancy, puberty, ageing, sexuality, rage, are presented as taboo and uncomfortable. In this way, the female body becomes almost monstrous; yet accepting bodily transformation that does not fit neatly into the societal standard and leaning into the grotesque is in itself, and act of resistance.

Wildlife painting can operate similarly by presenting animals that are not decorative symbols of innocence and beauty; especially with animals such as predators or scavengers who resist domestication.

Feminist horror frequently works through the uncanny: something at once familiar and unsettling. Wildlife painting has a similar capacity- for example, a beautiful animal that contains and represents danger.

Wildlife painting and feminist horror both challenge the viewer’s desire to make the nonhuman and the feminine safe and visually consumable.

For this series, I chose sharks: one of the oceans most feared predators. I was interested in representing the female body as predator ratner than pray, as well as drawing a parallel between two types of endangered bodies. Predators are also fascinating because they embody traits that humans (especially women) are discouraged from expressing: anger, hunger, dominance, territoriality, physical power etc.

In the end, I also made an etching that does not include a shark but rather a naval mine: a manmade object that transforms and suffocates the subject.

Apex Predator

Documentary Photography