Studio background

An Ongoing Inquiry: Heaven on Earth

Xia Xia’s practice is developing around a continuing question: how might traces of heaven be discovered in the world we inhabit?

Beginning with New Jerusalem in London, she explores the relationships between sacred architecture, urban memory and spiritual hope. Through The Book of Ruth, she investigates how stories can be brought to life through images, materials, light, performance and shared experience. These projects mark the beginnings of a wider inquiry into how places, images and narratives carry meaning across time.

She is drawn to the beauty of the natural world and to things that continue to live through damage and loss. Her subjects may emerge from biblical narratives, historic places, architecture, trees or the lives of people she encounters. Through close observation, historical research, drawing and the reworking of images, she seeks to discover unexpected connections between the visible world and the stories, memories and hopes it holds.

Her background in traditional painting, material-making and repair informs the way she approaches this process. She is interested in how images can hold more than what is immediately visible: how a tree might speak of life and renewal, how a building might preserve the memory of a community, or how an ordinary human encounter might reveal something of grace.

Rather than illustrating a fixed idea of paradise, Xia Xia hopes to make work that attends to the world as it is, with all its fragility and incompleteness, while remaining open to the hope of what it might become.