Phoebe-Agnès Mills

I utilize the body as a site for investigating transformation, contradiction, and the numinous. Integrating classical oil painting with research on alchemy, spiritual ecstasy, and my background in dance and somatics, I am interested in images that address phenomenological paradoxes. Alongside painting, photographs are manually manipulated as a way of abstracting the image, disrupting the supposedly fixed surface of a print with my fingers and inviting my body into a mechanically produced image. Water and light both function similarly, acting as both subject and metaphoric process through which the figure transforms, fracturing reality and elevating the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this way, the body becomes both medium and metaphor, a shifting surface where matter and spirit, the seen and unseen, continuously inform one another.

I myself am a product of opposites, having been raised by an academic from Berkeley, California and a poet from rural Louisiana. This as well as early experiences of death and bodily fragility led me to a deeply felt understanding of the dialecticals that coexist within life. The world seems to be bound together by webs of contradictions that somehow enforce and enhance each other- loss invites preciousness, light requires shadow, and a color’s complement is its opposite. What interests me is not just the separation of the world into dialectical halves, but the moments when those halves collide. I’m drawn to those moments of paradox because of the feeling they evoke in me- a kind of fizzing instability that leaves me both aching and alive. This feeling, though personal, also feels inevitable and universal.

Shaped by atelier training, time in a French monastery, and an upbringing in rural Tennessee, my work investigates the body’s role in mediating between the material and the spiritual.