Bianca Patania is an Italian artist based in Glasgow, currently completing her studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art. Working across painting, printmaking, photography, and film, her multidisciplinary practice explores themes of memory, personal identity, and the intimate connections between people and the landscapes they inhabit.

Bianca’s work often centres on the women in her family, especially her mother and grandmother, using personal narratives to reflect on intergenerational memory, belonging, and emotional inheritance. Rooted in her experience as a Sicilian woman living in Scotland, her practice is shaped by a dual sense of home. This cultural and geographical distance offers both tension and clarity, enabling her to view her heritage with both affection and critical distance.

Materiality plays a central role in Bianca’s process. She begins with the family archive and translates these into new visual forms through layering, repetition, and transformation. She allows her chosen mediums to speak to one another: painting and printmaking offer a tactile, time-rich approach, while photography and film capture immediacy, intimacy, and movement. Across all forms, Bianca is interested in what she calls a “memory of a memory” – not fixed recollection, but how time reshapes and softens what we hold onto.

A recurring motif in her work is Stromboli, the active volcano in the Aeolian Islands that looms large in her personal and cultural landscape. For Bianca, Stromboli is more than a physical presence – it’s a metaphor for transformation, fragility, and suspended time. Recent work has focused on her mother’s relationship with this island, using film as a collaborative, non-invasive way of observing how one moves through a place with familiarity and reverence. These quiet recordings resist spectacle and instead dwell in slowness and emotional resonance.

Bianca’s practice also examines the act of looking – how we frame others, how we are framed in return, and how intimacy can be both revealed and protected through visual language. Her work doesn’t aim to resolve memory or identity but to linger in their inbetweenness. Through soft surfaces, subtle repetitions, and layered narratives, she invites the viewer to slow down and notice – to consider how meaning is built through time, attention, and care.