Iulia Paraipan

About

Iulia Paraipan is a Romanian artist based in Enschede, the Netherlands. She studied sculpture at AKI ArtEZ, where she discovered textile in her final year, and it has been the material at the heart of her practice ever since.

Her tufted, felted and sewn works live between painting and sculpture: layered, tactile worlds rooted in Romanian folklore and in her own experience of migration and life between two cultures. They are inhabited by genderless creatures that cannot quite be read as bird, animal or reptile, protagonists of more open and equal worlds in which difference is celebrated.

Working with yarn, silk, mohair, wool and beads, she reinterprets techniques passed down through generations of women, honouring the history of textile while giving the material a contemporary voice.