Introducing Luciana Rosado: Newnham’s Artist-Researcher Collaborator, 2020

Newnham welcomes Portuguese artist Luciana Rosado as our second Artist-Researcher Collaborator. The annual scheme brings together artists and researchers to explore key topics of our time, enabling a symbiotic relationship between the arts and academia. Cambridge residents may have seen her powerful, thought-provoking work at Kettle’s Yard in 2019, as part of The Cambridge Show.

Luciana will be collaborating particularly with members of the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies. She is particularly interested in exploring the concept of home, identity and belonging, in the context of a collaboration with researchers on the theme of Forced Migration. However, the unprecedented situation within College and the world as a whole, has encouraged her to broaden out her topic and her collaboration.

Luciana explains “How do we navigate the constant permanence of change in our lives? I visually explore the concepts of memory, our own palimpsest of hidden thoughts and feelings, and how we build an identity in new contexts and on the face of life changes. Words are the starting point to my visual reflection on life expectations, personal choices and the relationship between our ideals and what we truly accomplish. My abstract paintings visually explore hidden feelings, memories, fears, and expectations, and my aim is to create images that give the viewers a moment to pause and breathe.

“During my time at Newnham College, I would like to have the opportunity to make a new body of work that can include a collaboration with the students at Newnham. I envision a series of conversations about the students idea of home associated with their life at the College and their thoughts feelings and expectations during their time at Newnham.”

Luciana holds a Degree in Painting-Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon and participates regularly both in individual and group exhibitions, in the UK and in Portugal. She represented Portugal in the touring European Biennale Jeune Creation Europeenne. She had her first solo exhibition in the UK, The Spare Room (2014) at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge and undertook an artist-residency – AA2A Artist-in-Residence scheme – at Anglia Ruskin School of Art in 2011/2012.

Find out more about her work: