Poppie Afrassa is an artist whose practice is rooted in lived experience, exploring identity, cultural belonging, and emotional complexity through painting. Drawing on her mixed heritage and personal history, her work reflects an ongoing search for connection, lineage, and self-understanding. As a mother of four, her practice has developed alongside domestic life, shaping the urgency and layered, interrupted nature of her process.

Through gesture, colour, and built surfaces, she examines how memory and feeling are carried within paint. Figures appear as uncertain presences—sites where vulnerability and resilience coexist—inviting viewers to recognise aspects of their own emotional experience.

Her work is driven by a longing for withheld language, history, and cultural continuity. Layered visual fields hold tension between visibility and erasure, with colour functioning as an emotional archive of memory, displacement, and imagined connection. Repetition, interruption, and accumulation mirror cycles of care, survival, and repair.

Informed by ongoing research into Ethiopian visual culture and diasporic experience, her paintings act as processes of recovery—transforming inherited absence into structures of strength. Afrassa’s work forms a living archive of becoming, shaped by what has been hidden, unearthed, and reclaimed.