Unseen Foundations marks a recent development in Giulia Zaniol’s practice, where painting, sculpture and installation begin to operate as a single material system. Emerging from over two decades of printmaking and painting, the work extends a long-standing engagement with vulnerability, resilience and unstable forms of support into spatial and sculptural form.

Rooted in Venetian origins, the installation draws on the city’s submerged timber foundations and fragile relationship with water as both material reference and metaphor. Venice becomes a lens through which broader social, environmental and human conditions are reflected: a city sustained through fragile interdependence, yet increasingly shaped by erosion, displacement and precarity.

Through encaustic panels, modelling wax and branching structures, Unseen Foundations explores how bodies endure when the ground beneath them is unstable. Figures appear suspended between formation and dissolution, gradually loosening from the image plane to inhabit their own uncertain physical space.

Installation: Unseen Foundations
Mixed media installation, Morley College, March 2026

Panel:
Encaustic painting on wood panel
60 X 84 cm

Sculpture on plinth:
Modelling wax and tree branches
Approx. 25 cm high