Mia Kokkoni was born in Greece and studied at Glasgow School of Art, where she has continued to live since graduating in 2022. Mia’s paintings connect to a world of storytelling that suggests folk tales and a kind of wistful nostalgia. Painted drily in muted tones, the paintings have an ambiguous quality – they are immediately recognisable and yet also otherworldly. A shuffling cast of characters (solitary women, dancing girls, figures leading horses) simultaneously seem to belong within the paintings and yet question how they got there.
The landscape she depicts is a hybrid of Kokkoni’s immediate experience. Fuelled by the rolling hills and clouds of her adopted Scottish home and yet peppered by clues of her past in the form of a Cypriot tree or Mediterranean flora and fauna. Her paintings describe an an imaginary land – but one that is rooted in Scottishness.
This conjured place suggests a kind of contradictory Celtic dreamscape with an unreliable sense of time and place, somehow heightened by the almost antique and slightly wonky nature of her home-made wooden frames. And yet, for all the apparent idiosyncrasy of her subject matter, Kokkoni’s paintings themselves are wholly authentic objects, marked by a truthful touch and a totally honest approach to picture making.
Ingleby presented Kokkoni's work for the first time as part of the INSTALMENTS series, which was on view from August - September 2025. This November, Ingleby presents Mia Kokkoni's first major solo exhibition. Bringing together a substantial body of work made over the last year or so, the paintings chart the passing of time and changing of seasons across the landscapes and dreamscapes of the artist’s imagination. More information on this upcoming exhibition can be found here.