Monthly Salon: First Encounter | Liana Berzins's Solo Presentation

Monthly Salon: First Encounter is where new works enter the PoMo Art Club ecosystem for the very first time. Each month, a curated selection of 5–7 artworks is presented in a rotating, salon-style display, inviting close looking, conversation, and re-encounter. This is not a conventional exhibition — it is a threshold: a space where works are first seen, discussed, and set in motion.

This month's presentation is a solo exhibition by Liana Berzins, unveiling a new body of drawings that move between mythology and memory, ancestry and imagination. Working slowly and deliberately across watercolour, ink, and coloured pencil, Berzins traces the distance between a culture she was raised on and the physical present she inhabits — building, piece by piece, a personal mythology that is always in the process of becoming.

About the Artist

Liana Berzins is a Latvian-Australian artist whose colourful, figurative drawings sit at the intersection of folklore, displaced memory, and the hybrid self. Raised on the traditions of a Latvia that existed almost a century ago, she works to reconcile her temporal and physical displacement from that culture through the iterative development of a personal mythology. Her mark-making is deliberate and slow — a way of translating the intangible into expression, of allowing the abstract and the imaginative to manifest for a moment between the body and the page.

These works exist across states of speculation and fragmentation. The body and its environment shift between abstraction and legibility, between what we believe we know and what is imagined. They are part of a larger inquiry into the hybrid self — who we are, where we come from, and how freely we can define ourselves. The answer, Berzins suggests, is ever malleable. We have the freedom to change it as we grow.