Every month Brave Island runs a Young Creative of the Month fund, where we spotlight a local young creative with an interview on our blog, and support them with funding of £100. For December, it’s artist and writer, Ioana Mateescu. This fund launches at the beginning of every month, you can apply to be Young Creative of the Month for January here.
Please can you tell us about your creative practice?
With my creative practice I like to experiment and always learn something new. I can’t say if I am a writer at the core, because both writing and drawing have been in my life since I can remember. I write poetry and prose, I love performing spoken word poetry on stage. Recently, I have joined the VEX Collective as well and I am a member of Comuna30, a poetry hub in Timișoara, Romania. For spoken word, I got to develop my skills at Strada Fără Nume (Street Without Name) in 2024, a workshop held by Tongue Fu in Timișoara.
My art is as outsider as possible, since I am a self taught artist with a personality disorder and on the spectrum (rejected twice from the art faculty). It is mostly monochrome, revolving around pencil and ink, but sometimes I allow colours in and experiment. I use other mediums, such as watercolour, charcoal and coloured pencils and mix around, see the end result. I would like to mention I do all my art on paper. I simply can’t do digital art for now, so I am at the mercy of good phone cameras and scanners.
Where do you draw inspiration for your Artwork?
I take inspiration from the Eastern European gloom, the idea of being a strange person that no one knows much about, being a foreign person in a whole new country, always having and giving cultural shocks. Another source of inspiration is every identity conflict I go through, from rejection of emphasised femininity to divinity and one’s relationship with both things. I can say that my grandfather’s art has influenced me as well, along with Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon and the Avant-garde in general. I am always discovering new artists that inspire me and motivate me to keep going with my art.
Music is another inspiration of mine. I always listen to music and get new art ideas, but it’s also the graphics the bands and musicians are using. Currently, I am doing a study on the preferred fonts and colour schemes used by hardcore and metalcore bands. I would like to incorporate those elements in my art. It is as outsider, as emotional and that’s what I want to achieve.
What would be your dream project/collaboration?
There are some dream projects for me. The simplest one is to publish a book of poetry, short prose or a mixture. The next ones involve graphic design. I would love to design book covers, because it would go very well with my Literary studies and I think books deserve better covers. I am thinking of making shirts with my own artworks and writings and hopefully one day I might design merchandise for a band I really love. People also deserve good band merch.
Where can people find your work if they’d like to support you?
People can find my work on Substack at pagesixtynine, a cheeky play on a band I love, and my art page on Instagram mxwoundfcker, still in construction. A sample of my poetry is available on Brevity Island and maybe soon in VEX Bomb (VEX Collective’s zine available both online and physically at your local library).
