Melania Toma: Skins, Rituals, and Living Entities

Artist Melania Toma joins host Victoria Comstock-Kershaw for a conversation on skins, textiles, transformation, and the strange life of materials. Working between painting, sculpture, and textile, Toma reflects on collecting discarded objects, travelling with animal skins across borders, Catholic iconography, bodily memory, and the porous boundary between the self and the more-than-human world. Speaking through ideas of energy, intuition, and interconnectedness, the episode moves through questions of material agency, abjection, hierarchy, and the emotional weight objects carry over time. The conversation also explores London’s artistic ecology, residencies as transformative experiences, and the role of instinct in building a practice that continuously shifts.