Painting as a Leaky Body: Material Entanglements and Feminist Ecologies in Expanded Painting
Researcher profile: https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/2928-annie-riga/about
My research investigates leakiness as a feminist-materialist methodology within the field of expanded painting. It examines how rupture, spillage, and permeability can operate as conceptual and material strategies that challenge painting’s historical containment, autonomy, and purity.
Through materially embedded processes such as cutting, pooling pigment, and attaching ceramics, I reconfigure painting as a vulnerable, relational body—one that exceeds its frame and enters into dialogue with architectural, ecological, and bodily environments. Leakiness functions both as a tactile condition and as a way of thinking, emerging through saturation, seepage, and collapse.
This practice-led research approaches painting as an active site of inquiry, where material gestures generate theoretical and ethical reflection. Studio processes are treated as methods of thinking-through-making, while exhibitions operate as testing grounds for how painting behaves as a porous interface between surface, body, and space.
The project is informed by intersectional eco-feminist perspectives that embrace instability, interdependence, and excess as productive conditions. Leakiness becomes an ethical as well as a material proposition—one that resists containment and privileges relation, care, and vulnerability over control and closure.
Drawing from personal and geographical contexts, particularly the Mediterranean coastal environment, my research engages with watery imaginaries, mythological references, and lived experiences of material and ecological entanglement. These situated perspectives inform a poetics of fluidity and transformation that connects painting to broader questions of embodiment, environment, and interrelation.
Ultimately, the research contributes to contemporary discussions on expanded painting and feminist material practices, proposing leakiness as both an artistic and ethical strategy—one that foregrounds fragility, openness, and care as vital components of contemporary creative inquiry.
Conference Presentation
Painting: Does It Die, or Does It Leak?
MTU Painting Symposium: “Painting – Crisis / Death / Resurrection”
Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, Ireland — March 2025
This symposium brought together artists, theorists, and educators to examine the enduring “death of painting” debate and its resonance in contemporary practice. Through a series of presentations and discussions, participants considered how painting continues to negotiate its relevance amid technological, conceptual, and ecological shifts.
My contribution, Painting: Does It Die, or Does It Leak?, engaged with the symposium’s central theme by questioning how notions of vitality, decay, and transformation operate within expanded painting. Presented alongside talks by Brendan Fletcher, Rachael Gunning, Jane Humphries, Rachel Magdeburg, Alistair Payne, Magnus Quaife, Dominic Shepherd, John Walter, and Sitian Zeng—with a keynote by James Merrigan—the event fostered critical dialogue across diverse approaches to painterly practice.
Organised in partnership with MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, AnSEO – The Student Engagement Office, and The Innovation and Enterprise Office, the symposium created an interdisciplinary platform for rethinking painting’s position within today’s cultural, material, and pedagogical contexts.
Watch full conference:
Teaching and Workshops
Seminar and workshop with MA Painting and MA Sculpture students
Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), Spring 2025
This two-part seminar and workshop was developed for postgraduate students in Painting and Sculpture to critically engage with contemporary discourses surrounding expanded painting and interdisciplinary material practices. The sessions aimed to bridge theoretical inquiry with studio experimentation, enabling students to interrogate how painting can operate beyond the flat surface and within spatial, bodily, and ecological contexts.
The first session introduced key texts addressing the shifting ontology of painting in relation to embodiment, space, and relationality. Through collective reading and discussion, students examined painting’s position within contemporary art’s hybrid and post-disciplinary conditions.
The second session translated these theoretical frameworks into practice through material and spatial experimentation. Students were invited to reconfigure existing works or develop new ones that tested the thresholds between painting, object, and installation.
The series encouraged critical reflection on process, form, and material agency, foregrounding painting as a dynamic mode of inquiry rather than a fixed medium. It contributed to postgraduate pedagogies that emphasise research-led learning, cross-disciplinary dialogue, and the development of reflective studio methodologies.
