Leading up to her first solo exhibition with AGH Art Sales + Services, Intimate Geographies, we sat down with Christina Sealey to discuss the ideas and experiences that have shaped this new body of work.

My work has always been concerned with how people are shaped by the environments they inhabit. Earlier projects often focused on landscapes, interiors, and the emotional character of particular places. With Intimate Geographies, that interest shifts toward adolescence and the deeply personal environments young people occupy. These are places where they feel secure, and where identity is negotiated, performed, and transformed. Rather than serving as a backdrop, these settings actively participate in the process of becoming. This body of work feels like a continuation of questions I've been asking for many years, but on a deeply intimate and personal scale.

Many of these paintings depict teenagers in their bedrooms or shared social spaces. What drew you to adolescence as a subject?

It lends to the psychological experience of space rather than simply its physical description. I wanted the spaces to feel fluid and our gaze is forever roaming, a bit chaotic and unstable. Kind of looking at how reflections spill and there are areas of order and structure and then complete chaos. When the light enters from multiple directions, and the geometry of the composition continually redirects the viewer's eye you keep moving around the painting - there's some uncertainty to where your eye is going.

Two works in progress for the forthcoming exhibition "Intimate Geographies" pictured in the artist's studio

You have spoken previously about your fascination with place, perception, and phenomenology. How have those ideas influenced this exhibition?

Those interests have been foundational to my practice for decades. As a student, I became deeply engaged with questions about how we experience and understand the spaces around us. What interests me is that environments are never neutral. They influence behaviour, memory, emotion, and identity. The work in this series reflects my ongoing belief that places carry their own emotional and psychological presence.

This exhibition marks a significant return to figurative portraiture as the central figures in the compositions. What does this body of paintings represent for you at this moment in your career?

These paintings emerged over a period that included illness, grief, teaching, commissions, family responsibilities, and a great deal of uncertainty. During that time, many of the ideas behind this work continued to develop quietly in the background. Returning to portraiture and pursuing these themes has felt both emotional and necessary. After a very pressured phase of life, it represents a return to the questions that have motivated my work since the beginning: who we are, where we belong, and the complex relationships that fit are bound into the geographies we create around us.