Gina DeCagna

Gina DeCagna is an American artist who has been based in London for the past six years. She is currently initiating this not-for-profit curatorial platform dedicated to rewriting human stories, Palimpsest Projects (2024–present), working across London and the UK, with ambitions to expand internationally, cross-culturally, and globally in scope.

She earned her MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020), where she focused on multimedia storytelling techniques in contemporary art, following her BA (Honors) in English, Creative Writing and Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania (2016) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At UPenn, she studied contemporary art and writing practices with a particular interest in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, and had founded, edited, and directed a publication and community of over four hundred collaborating contemporary artists and writers known as Symbiosis across four years (2012–2016).

Throughout her artistic practice, she slowly questions unfolding social processes and transformations through durational, iterative projects that she coalesces, assembles, and collages as publications, paper-based immersive or architectural installations, large and small drawings, artists’ books, prints, or other documents – transforming material, language, text, or writing for storytelling in different contexts by suspending, stacking, layering, drawing, or mapping different components.

Gingerly moving against hyper-capitalist logic and time, she centres her concerns around issues of social sustainability and human welfare by questioning prevalent symbols and systems. She playfully provokes sociopolitical shifts in contemporary Western society, especially from Anglo-American perspectives, and oscillates between moments of innermost, private recollections and public responses through constructions of the environment, media, or architecture. She seeks to whittle away at opaque power structures, especially instances of overwriting human dignity, truth, and complexity.

Her art has shown in solo and group exhibitions across London, New York, and Philadelphia. Her critical writing and poetry have appeared in a variety of small-press and independent cultural publications.