Lucia Vera Rosa

Lucia Vera Rosa is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, performance, video and sound to explore the paradoxes of identity, ability, and play. Drawing from personal experiences of navigating the world being deaf in a hearing environment and English and Hungarian heritage, her practice centres the body, often her own, as a site of resistance, transformation, and invention.

Her sculptures construct alternative habitats— part-prosthetic, part-stage-where the compromised or medicalised body can exist on its own terms. In these spaces, performance becomes a tool to disrupt the rigidity of societal norms and medical constraints, offering instead fluid, intuitive acts of becoming.

Through castings, rupture, and sensory experimentation, Lucia Vera Rosa cultivates a personal mythology shaped by pain, play, and persistence.

With a restless sensitivity to both material and emotion, her practice questions what it means to function, to belong, and to evolve in spaces where language, identity, and body are constantly in flux. Her work has been featured in diverse contexts-from Glasgow’s grassroots spaces to The Venice Biennale, where she performed as part of Danielle Freakley’s work at the Seychelles Pavilion in 2024.

Lucia Vera Rosa (b. 2002, Liverpool) approaches her identity and culture selfishly. She uses her own body as a vessel to intuitively communicate a balance existing between the playfulness of objects, whether found or created in the studio, the anxieties and pleasures that surround transforming them into something entirely new and some type of hopeful wish to return to what it was.

Her sculptures and video performances approach this by crafting sensations to play a role in mending an impairment, giving a greater appreciation of everyday function with a compromised body. She is interested in how her body can move in restrained conditions, when medical intervention and environment come up against self-will. She creates worlds and habitats within her sculptures where there is a possibility for her own body to enter and function on her own terms.

She explores body pain: the anger, the fluids, the ruptures and the retches as there is a story to create within each state. This work then creates her own aesthetic values and beauty on its own terms. The artist questions ideas of perceived ability and disability; she navigates the deaf community and hearing world, finding that there is a paradox in comfort about being in the middle ground. This middle ground becomes a space for her to play on her own terms, using her body, mixing materials and questioning who she is becoming. There is space in the middle ground for her to grow into what her body needs and what emotions will fuel the way. It is all about playing her own way with what is, and what needs to become: using castings of her own body to rupture the constraint of medical devices and to question how they fit in with her flesh and bones.

It is her personal experiences of English and Hungarian heritage that explore stories of identity entwined with her family’s history. The inferred otherness of being deaf intertwines with the inferred otherness of being Hungarian/ English. Through play, she looks at the emotional disturbance of what is, what was and what is becoming as a form of investigating ways of spontaneous creation, blurring those boundaries of making and accepting the ultimate fate of being deaf in a hearing world.