Hena Pašić is a painter and drawer from West London who uses the process of creating her works to escape the challenging realities of the world around her and reconnect with her childhood imagination. Her work has been exhibited at The Holy Art Gallery in London.
To her, the essence of youth is aspiration, longing for a better future, and wanting to fast-forward to being an adult who could have anything they wanted and be whoever they wanted. As a child, she would draw her own characters based on her future self and the home and material possessions she imagined herself having, or a fantasy world full of fairies, mermaids, and talking flowers that she could escape to whenever she wanted.
Like artists Sebastian Chaumeton, Stella Winter, and several others on the platform TikTok, Pašić’s work draws on pop culture, popular social media and design aesthetics of the early-2000s, and toys that brought her joy as a child. In an exploration of nostalgia, anticipated nostalgia, and the confusing relationship between past, present, and future, she brings to life objects and characters that symbolise this feeling of longing for a different future which has remained constant since she was very young. She seeks to understand her own coping mechanisms of avoidance, daydreaming, and disassociation, and her constant feeling of being disconnected from her body, by asking questions like “How do we change over time?” And “How do we stay the same?”
As someone who grew up on the internet using MSN, MySpace, Bebo, Piczo, Club Penguin, Millsberry, Virtual Magic Kingdom, Tumblr, and Twitter, all as forms of artistic and creative expression, she is captivated by art’s relationship with the internet and pop culture.
She also reflects on gender constructions in her work. As a queer woman, she is fascinated with femininity, ‘hyper-femininity’, and what it means to be a ‘woman’. She takes pleasure in her overuse of the colour pink and her over-the-top depictions of ‘girls’ toys’ and other objects and characters that the world associates with girlhood and womanhood. Like photographer Maisie Cousins, she often likes to contrast these motifs of femininity with explorations of the disgusting or grotesque, invoking feelings of discomfort and the type of sickness you get after eating too many sweets.
Her portrait acrylic paintings take inspiration from Marlene Dumas and George Rouy in their gestural, fluid, and expressionistic style. But with Pašić’s method of building up thin layers of watery paint and bringing forward warmth and light in her interpretation of the colours and skin tones, her works uniquely capture the soul of her subjects. Primarily, she paints her friends and family, who she feels reflect and represent her more than herself during times when she feels particularly disconnected from her own body due to her neurodivergence and body dysmorphia.
Pašić’s biro drawings resemble the early sketches of Henry Moore in her use of multiple, gestural lines to build depth, tone, and movement. Like the drawings of Steven Campbell, there is a strong story-telling element. She draws the people, places, and things that get caught in her mind, varying the scale of each object and the way they each
interact with each other in an overcrowded, confusing web that represents the infinite nature of consciousness, as well as the constant interaction between her past, present, and future daydreams. The drawings tell the story of her consciousness- the changing fascinations, obsessions, aspirations, and reflections, and the fleeting intrusive thoughts, memories, and hyper-fixations.
