ANNA BANANA

Creating at the intersection of acrylic, print transfer, and photography, my practice examines texture as landscape.

I've been working with acrylic for years — long before this project began. Photography came later, almost as a hobby, until I discovered what happens when you photograph an acrylic work as a landscape: the camera reveals an effect the eye alone doesn't catch, another life the acrylic takes on once it's seen through a lens.

That discovery shaped everything that followed. I found myself drawn to the glossy sheen of printed posters — the way ink sits on paper, catching light — and to the meticulous precision of Japanese printmaking, where every line and texture is considered down to the smallest detail. Both pushed me toward monotype.

The process is decalcomania, a form of monotype developed by the Surrealists in the 1930s: acrylic is applied between two surfaces — paper, sometimes cardboard, always varying — which are then pressed together and pulled apart. What's left behind is never fully controlled. Acrylic has body. I don't mix or alter it; I leave it whole, as it is, so it stays true to its nature as a material. It is thick and plastic, and it holds its shape as the surfaces part. In the light of the photograph it becomes alive.

It's this in-between moment, where the acrylic stops being acrylic and starts resembling tissue, capillary, or roots, that I'm after. Self-taught, I've spent the past few years developing this process, photographing each result as part of a surreal landscape until the material reveals a structure entirely its own.

Each piece begins in the randomness of thick acrylic and two surfaces — and becomes something impossible to stop looking at.