Melania Toma – interview

Toma explains her interest in collective and interspecies perspectives, her dynamic process, and her quest to unearth the stories hidden in organic and industrial fabrics

What better antidote to the British winter than to step inside the colourful studio of Melania Toma? Born in Padova in 1996 and based in London, Toma is interested in post-human philosophies that question human dominance in the Anthropocene. Believing in the “agency of materials”, she lets the material determine the shape of the works, which are often hybrids between painting, sculpture and textile.

Melania Toma, The passenger (Creature), 2024. Pigments, aluminium, steel, vegetable fibres, cotton, thread, wood. View from studio at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Thread residency, Senegal. © The Artist.

In Toma’s wildly imaginative worlds, there are no hierarchies: elements of plants, animals and other organic matter coexist; personal narratives interweave with mythological references, and everything is pulsating with a palpable energy. Symbolic forms recur, always hovering on the familiar and the unsettling. Central to Toma’s practice is the idea of “the cell as a political and poetic site, where transmission, regeneration and contamination happen, and where larger ecological and social revolutions quietly begin”.

Melania Toma, FOREST BEINGS I, 2025. Pigments, charcoal, crayons, acrylic paint, on papel amate, 60 x 40 cm. © The Artist.

Travel inspires Toma for its ability to enable you to see the world from a different perspective, and she recently completed the Girlpower residency in the South of France, as well as residencies at Casa Wabi in Oaxaca, Mexico, and at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Thread in Senegal.

Interview by SABINE CASPARIE
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

Melania Toma, DOOR I-II-III (from Doors for the Kagneji House series), 2024. Pigments, charcoal, oil pastel, sand, varnish on wood, 30 x 23 x 3 cm each. © The Artist.