Silvia Poloto

I begin by paying attention.

Every body of work starts with something ordinary—a flower, a room, a photograph, a passing thought, a memory. Observation, however, is only the beginning. What interests me is what happens between what I see and what I end up with.

Working across painting, photography, and mixed media, I follow ideas rather than materials, allowing each body of work to discover its own visual language. I am less interested in describing the visible world than in uncovering what lies beneath it.

My work often begins with personal experience, but autobiography is never its destination. I look for the place where the personal opens into something shared—where beauty and impermanence, presence and absence, memory and imagination, certainty and mystery can exist at once.

I don't make art to explain the world. I make it to pay closer attention to it. Each series is an attempt to understand something I may never fully know. If my work offers anything, I hope it is simply an invitation to feel.