Arabella Ross Hampshire, United Kingdom

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Arabella Ross is an artist whose vibrant paintings and collages blend colour, emotion, and storytelling.  Inspired by nature and guided by instinct, her work is spontaneous and expressive.  Beneath bold colours, Ross explores deeper emotional themes of grief, loss, and transformation. Through symbolic and subconscious imagery, she creates a universal visual language as shared human experience.

My path comes from a genetic imprint of being an artist, of being brought up in a bohemian environment and of having a father and a mother who were both creative.  Through the legacy of my father’s creative spirit and his nurturing, I have come to realise how this has deepened my practice, my life’s vocation.

My paintings occupy an intuitive space within a pictorial world that is charged with passion and energy. The compositions reveal themselves during the painting process, where images become structures of forms and line, a visceral record, a vivid colour palette and fluidity. The paintings are grounded in gesture and the sensuality of paint on canvas bringing together calmness, light and darker psychic imagery to convey deeply felt emotion. A diary of isolation and an intimate connection to myself. I am exploring deeply personal themes of love, female embodiment, the shadow, grief and transformation. In the quest for forms, symbols, and poetics, inner images surface, sink, and reappear. The sources of inspiration I draw on are the human body, art history, mythology and the unconscious.

My collages represent a body of work began in 2020. Woven together these quiet and richly textured works are made from fragments of pencil drawings, paint, family ephemera, gold leaf, vintage diaries and postal markings. The collages act as vessels for stories often left unspoken, embedded within women’s everyday lives. Gold leaf is used as a symbolic and material device, evoking reverence, loss, and the sacred weight of memory. . The collages explore memories and the experiences of living in London during the 1970’s and 1980’s.  Letters and diaries from  my mother and father’s correspondence emerged in the collaged work.  The old Tube maps, the pale blue airmail letters from Cyprus to Sussex, the torn fragments of love letters, pressed flowers, photographs and family ephemera…. Through the process of ‘excavation’ within my art, having access to my father’s creative life – hundreds of photographs, 35mm films made in the 1970’s, writings and documentary research - I have been able to telescope in on different eras to the present day, cultivating a deeper sense of self and knowledge.  . I have a Master’s degree in Fine Art, Chelsea college of Art. A BA Hons Fine Art, Wolverhampton Polytechnic. A Ceramics Diploma, City Lit, London. July 2026 I will graduate from three years Correspondence course at Turps Banana Art school.  Recent Exhibitions: Art Gotham, New York.  Aqua Art Miami - Miami 2025.  Island 111, Cyprus High Commission, London 2026. Art Capital, Comparaisons, Grand Palais, Paris 2025 and 2026. The Turps Split Collective, Guernsey 2026.  Future: The Artivism Awards, Venice, Italy 2026.  Split Collective, Dublin, November 2026