“The making of my art unfolds, is born, and ignites within me, alone, witness of my being, alone, but conditioned by the entire universe, by the atoms within me, by the cells ended up here after millennia of evolution. I make my works from nothing, but drawing from all of this. My existence (in space, in nature) as the sole instrument of creation. From here, I utilize my hair, the leaves, the powders, the pigments that I extract from the elements I find on the ground and that I gather with my hands. The dimensions of the works are those that I, myself, can handle alone, without external equipment or support. I want to say that this is the voice, the sibilance that my existence produces, by itself. This is the only way to feel connected with others (meaning, the environment), to, in a moment of profound solitude, feel immersed in the world-system, when I paint from the soil or on the trees, in a desperate yet perfectly sensible gesture of connection.”

Francesca Virginia Coppola (Rome, 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Rome and Los Angeles. Her work unfolds at the crossroads of visual art and ecology, with a specific focus on zooanthropology and canine cognitive ethology. She uses found elements including barks, branches, seeds, rocks, and their extracted pigments to explore the correlation of time, human beings, organic and inorganic matter. In doing so, she embraces installation, assemblage, and soil/tree ‘rubbings’ – a technique she developed to capture her situated relationship with the environment.

Site specificity is a pivotal aspect of Coppola’s practice. When conceiving her exhibitions, she engages with the surroundings of the venues. This reflects in her titles, where scientific nomenclature, time, and geographical references indicate where and when the materials are gathered. These fragments of reality are transitional objects bridging nature as a primal level of existence to the artist’s inner thinking. Coppola’s empathy towards landscape, animals, and plants manifests in her thoughtful and subtle gestures aiming at disclosing the intrinsic poetry and elegiac existence of these beings while establishing intimate yet transversal narratives extending through time and space.

Such a unique approach to the organic dimension has gained recognition from various institutions in Europe, Canada, and the United States. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally at Art Centre Silkeborg Bad (Silkeborg, Denmark), Casa delle Culture (Rome, Italy), Brand Library & Art Center (Glendale, California, USA), among others, and has been featured via MoMA’s In the Studio program. She’s been awarded residencies at NAHR, Nature, Art & Habitat Residency (Val Taleggio, Italy, 2024), and at The Wild: Artist in Residence (Ontario, Canada, 2019). Her work is held in multiple private Italian collections.