Bianca Patania is an Italian Glasgow-based artist working across painting, printmaking, photography, and film. A 2025 graduate of The Glasgow School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking, and currently undertaking an MFA at the same institution, her practice investigates memory, identity, and intergenerational relationships, often drawing on family archives and personal histories. She is fascinated by the spaces where memory and imagination intersect, transforming inherited stories into layered works that linger between intimacy, recollection, and the uncanny. Old family photographs, casually taken yet quietly elegant, serve as starting points for her exploration. Though etching, painting, and mark-making, Bianca embraces process, materiality, and imperfection, allowing them to carry meaning beyond precise representation. Her work reimagines ancestral narratives in ways that are intimate and dreamlike. Through colour, texture, and layered forms, she creates spaces where memory and imagination coexist, inviting reflection on the persistence, fragility, and emotional resonance of personal and collective histories.

See Bianca’s work as part of our annual autumn open call exhibition, Future/Past, featuring a sublime collection of works by twenty six artists inspired by ancestral echoes and future visions; pieces that dismantle tradition, reimagine narratives, and linger in the margins of the radical, the oneiric, and the everyday.

Hi Bianca! Tell us, how did your artistic journey start?
My journey really began when I left Sicily as a teenager. Moving to Glasgow was disorienting, I was far from my family, the language, and the familiar textures of the life I knew so well. That rupture pushed me to look back more closely, holding onto fragments of memory and making sense of them through painting. What began as a way of reconnecting with my origins has since grown into a multidisciplinary practice, exploring how memory, identity, and distance shape one another.

 How did you arrive at the theme of your work?
At its core, my work is about embracing my origins and reinterpreting them. For a long time, I dismissed parts of my heritage as mundane or even tacky. But distance has given me perspective, and I now see those details as valuable markers of identity, fragments of my history that are worth sharing. Returning to Sicily has become an ongoing process of rediscovery, one that reveals both the allure of the landscape and my frustration with its cultural stagnation. This tension fuels my work and keeps me asking questions about place, belonging, and memory.

Can you walk us through your creative process?

I often begin with a photograph, a fleeting gesture, or an everyday moment that lingers in my memory. These fragments become starting points that are then transformed through layering, colour, mark-making, printmaking, or film, with each medium offering a distinct contribution to the evolution of my pieces of wok. Layering is central to my practice, allowing me to build depth and meaning gradually. I embrace imperfection, letting the materials and process shape the work rather than controlling it too tightly. Subtle details often shape how the work unfolds. For me, the process is always a dialogue between memory, material, and imagination.

How has your practice changed over time?
At first, my practice was rooted in painting. Over time, it became more multidisciplinary, expanding into printmaking, photography, and film. I recently graduated from Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, and it was there that my practice really began to deepen. I found space to experiment, to question. Over time, my practice has grown more interdisciplinary. I began working with printmaking, photography and film. Being in Scotland has given me a kind of creative freedom I hadn’t expected. It’s where I’ve found community, and a space to experiment boldly through collaboration and sharing.

 How do you know when a piece is complete? 
For me, a piece feels complete when it holds a balance between clarity and ambiguity, when enough has been said, but something remains unsaid. I stop when the work no longer feels like it needs me, when it carries its own rhythms and leaves space for the viewer to enter.

What advice would you give to artists who are just starting out?
Find community and trust your perspective, even when it feels small or uncertain. Early recognition can change everything, not because of validation, but because it gives you courage to keep going. Let yourself experiment, fail, and grow. The quiet, vulnerable stories you have to tell are just as powerful as bold declarations.

Find out more about Bianca’s work on Instagram. Future/Past runs at Six Foot Gallery until Tuesday 14th October.