Artistic Statement

I work to make visible what often escapes the eye: the invisible pressures that traverse the body, the states of saturation, fatigue, and silent endurance. Creation becomes for me a space of resistance—not heroic, but persistent—where the body, fragile, continues despite excess, erasure, and incomprehension.

My work explores the body as an unstable territory, subjected to internal and external forces that are difficult to name. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and poetry, I map experiences of vulnerability, overload, and transformation, translating physical, cognitive, and emotional sensations into visual and literary language. My sculptures, covered in needles and glass pearls, give material presence to pain, tension, and endurance, while my poems give voice to the lived reality of chronic illness. Forms across media emerge, fragment, or dissolve, refusing immediate legibility or fixed narrative.

As a multidisciplinary artist, I am drawn to liminal spaces—where the visible and invisible intersect, where pain, memory, and perception overlap. Repetitive gestures, accumulation, surface saturation, and dense mark-making become acts of endurance: each work carries the trace of time, persistence, and the body’s quiet resistance.

Regardless of medium—ink drawings, washes, paintings, needle-and-pearl sculptures, spatial interventions, or poetry—a single thread runs through my practice: giving form and voice to what is often denied, minimized, or rendered illegible. My work evokes the heaviness of fatigue, diffuse nerve pain, and burning sensations, while also highlighting the body’s capacity to endure, inhabit excess, and persist without resolution.

When installed in public spaces, my work moves these intimate experiences into a collective dimension. It invites viewers and readers to slow down, recognize shared bodily and cognitive states, and question societal norms around functionality, productivity, and visibility. My art and poetry function as sites of encounter, recognition, and reflection on invisibility, resilience, and endurance in contemporary life.

Bio

Lavi Picu is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, ink drawing, installation, mixed media, and writing. Her work is situated within a contemporary inquiry into the body, identity, and the visible and invisible dimensions of human experience.

Her approach is characterized by sustained attention to materiality, texture, and the relationships between form, gesture, space, and light. Through paintings, sculptures, drawings, and installation-based works, she develops a formal vocabulary in which organic forms, repetition, and surface alteration convey states of tension, transformation, and resilience.

Picu’s work is deeply informed by her personal experience with chronic illness (Lyme disease and Lupus). She explores the invisible symptoms of these conditions: cognitive fog, physical fatigue, altered sensations, etc., translating experiences that are often overlooked or misunderstood into visual and spatial forms. These themes are approached conceptually and sensitively, allowing for multiple, open-ended interpretations rather than illustrative representation.

Through a rigorous and engaged practice, Lavi Picu conceives art as a space of mediation and translation—capable of rendering perceptible experiences that resist articulation. Her work invites reflection on vulnerability, embodied memory, and the capacity of contemporary art to create spaces for dialogue, empathy, and awareness.

To learn more about Lyme disease or her Lyme journey, please visit her website a-zlyme.com.