Lydia Cecilia Artist Biography

Lydia Cecilia was born in Sevilla, Spain, and currently lives in Vancouver, the city Lydia believes has allowed her to find herself as an artist. Having had a previous career in Physics, Lydia is a self-taught artist whose path led her from the study of Plasma Physics to a unique artistic expression through collage. Her attraction to collage comes from its infinite possibilities; the freedom that comes from deconstructing and recreating images in her own way has allowed Lydia to explore new worlds and realities through disorder and even chance. 

Lydia sees her artistic process as a way to search and create her own identity, finding through collage the opportunity to express her ideas on contemporary issues including gender, identity, and sexuality. Attempting to break social hierarchies and limitations found in mainstream images, Lydia reconstructs fragments of an endless source of imagery to express the complexity of all identities. 

As a visual artist, Lydia believes in the power of images to build and transform our society. Her work aims to transcend ideas of gender roles, masculinity, and femininity to represent a more inclusive world.

Statement

'Female Horde' Series

Our society tends to understand women as entities that have to be beautiful and young. In Lydia Cecilia’s ‘Female horde’ series, the flowers and fashion elements are a metaphor that aims to create in the viewer a cognitive estrangement. 

Cognitive estrangement is a term coined to describe science fiction because of its effect of separating or "estranging" us from our usual assumptions about reality.

In the ‘Female horde’ series, familiar objects and ideas, such as flowers and fashion, are used to inspire new ideas of women as powerful, complex, and resilient creatures in their own nature. They are used to emphasize female power and how all of these elements are tools for empowerment, in opposition to the general understanding of them as female weakness.