Jose Zavala Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
Misiones (b.1960), Argentina, Zavala grew up in an artistic environment of writers, musicians, and landscape painters, and these reemerged later in his life when he adopted art in different formats. Past awards include public commissions for an urban sculpture in Hertfordshire in 2006. Zavala was trained in fine art at the Newlyn School of Art in 2021-22. He has lived in the UK since 1996.
This series started with a memory. Not a single, clear memory, but a feeling I've carried since childhood. Standing near a stream, light filtering through trees, the sense that the world was generous in a way I didn't have words for yet. I grew up in Argentina and have lived in the UK since 1996, and somewhere between those two places, that feeling became something I wanted to reach toward again. Not to recreate it exactly, but to see if I could make work that carried the same quality: a kind of lightness, a sense of movement, a world that felt alive and responsive. The images in 'Transparency' grew out of something unexpected. I had been working on a painted sculpture called Crucify Butterfly, embedding and stamping vivid colour into its surface. The process felt like a kind of wondering, pressing, shifting, responding to whatever emerged. Before mounting the sculpture, I began photographing it up close, focusing on small details, almost abstract fragments. In those moments, I realised how powerful a storyteller the camera could be. What started as a close-up exploration became its own body of work. A micro view that now embraces and expands my childhood imagery. There's a paradox I'm interested in, the unconscious of my reconstructed adolescent imagination of a time that had gone, which suddenly summarised into a conscious capturing of those imaginaries. That tension interests me. It's about what happens when you put things together that don't usually belong, and something new grows out of that collision. I think about overimposing a plethora of textures, a web of fungal filaments like trees and roots exchanging the nutrients they need to survive. That feels like a model for how I want to work. Not solitary. Not pure, but a collaboration between things that seem opposed. The final images are small glimpses—5x7cm details—blown up in size, then hand-intervened as a final tender touch. I want them to ask for a kind of attention that feels less like looking and more like being present. If there's any intention behind the work, it's that. To invite someone to slow down, to see through a child's eyes again, to feel that the world still has room for wonder.
