In Tenderbeing, Ariadna Dane charts a profound inward turn. Best known for her meditative studies of the natural world, an amalgamation of AR and paintwork honouring overlooked, organic wonders, her latest series marks a striking shift. Not a rejection of her earlier work, but a transformation; where her past paintings explored the visual poetry of nature, Tenderbeing feels like a slow, courageous excavation of the self.
By Sophie Heatley | 06 Aug 2025
Inspired by the intricate forms and textures found in nature, Dane has long translated often-overlooked details into evocative, interactive ecosystems. Reassembling and reflecting nature’s cycles of creation and decay, Dane blurs the line between the tangible and the abstract.
Her latest work, however, shifts away from observing plant life to embodying it as a metaphor for the human experience. If her previous works read like visual poems dedicated to nature, Tenderbeing reads like a journal: personal, searching, and unflinching. To support this, short poems accompany each work, presenting entryways into the emotional terrain of the image and offering a space for reflection.
Dane offers a very specific metaphorical system that feels both personal and universal: plants as mirrors for the human condition. Not in their beauty, but in their ability to “push through darkness and rupture the surface towards light.” Through plants, Dane found a way to express vulnerability without loosing herself to it. “I realised I could tell emotional stories without depicting them literally. Somehow, that made them even more powerful and honest.”
Each painting in Tenderbeing began with a memory, a private reckoning, a knot of feeling. Rather than illustrate these experiences, Dane sat with them and asked: If this were a plant, what shape would it take? What colour would it be? What posture would it hold? The works that emerged are, therefore, not floral studies, but emotional portraits; monochromatic compositions rendered in tones that feel less like choices and more like inevitabilities.
The piece Memories, for instance, is swathed in a muted green. “It’s actually a clover-green,” she says, “like the ones I’d pick as a child and wish on. The colour for this had to be green, but not a bright green. I was looking for a reserved, almost translucent one to capture how this memory has faded. It’s hazy, like looking at something through glass.”
Held, layered with purple, pink, and blue hues, is bruise-like in its palette, capturing a strange yet relatable alchemy of hurt and healing. The effect is both tender and aching. Materially, the paintings are made on handmade cotton rag paper, its rough, imperfect texture giving a fleshy tactility, like skin. “The surface felt right,” Dane explains. “It’s uneven, inconsistent, which can be interpreted bodily or emotionally. It feels human.”
The anatomy of Embodied goes a step further. Shapely and amorphous, at once botanical and corporeal, the poppy form seems to contract and recede with fibrous, womb-like contours. Blushing, crimson hues bloom from its triangular and serendipitously uterine centre. “It’s about the shifting nature of being in a female body”, says Dane. “It speaks to layered experience and I welcome the different ways it might be read, because that multiplicity is part of the truth.”
Without background nor horizon, the compositions are close and highly focused. In their tight framing, Dane explains, they mimic the way emotions can feel when they take hold: intense, consuming, sometimes impossible to ignore. “When you feel something deeply, it becomes your whole world. That’s what I wanted to convey.”
Yet, for all their intensity, these are not loud works per se. There is a hushed quality to Tenderbeing, a restraint that draws the viewer in rather than confront them head-on. “They’re whispering, not shouting,” Dane says. “They gently ask for your attention.”
This tension between vulnerability and privacy, revelation and protection, lies at the heart of the series. Dane admits she is a naturally guarded person, someone who finds it difficult to share her innermost thoughts. But, in producing Tenderbeing, she allowed herself to become exposed, piece by little piece.
The recurring use of cut-outs, literal absences that hold symbolic weigh, is conceptually rich. They actively present what is missing: a reversal of traditional compositional logic. In Core, petals are missing, stripped away, exposing a central void. In Embodied, they teeter on the verge of falling, capturing a moment just before loss or change.
These gaps speak of grief, but also of potential. “The cut-outs are not decorative,” Dane insists. “They speak about what can’t be painted. For some, this might be interpreted as the parts of ourselves that will always remain private, for others, maybe a gap in our understanding of a certain experience. Sometimes, absence says more than presence.”
Ultimately, Tenderbeing is not an appeal for sympathy but an invitation: to recognise ourselves in the inarticulate and to dwell in the unsaid. Dane gives just enough to orient the viewer, but leaves space where our own experience can be mirrored back to us through metaphor. “There’s so much hidden within each work,” Dane concludes. “Even I haven’t reached the bottom of them. And maybe I never will. That’s part of being human: we’re always still processing.”