GATESHEAD.- Opening on 5 July 2025, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art presents a major new commission and solo exhibition by London-based Spanish artist, Saelia Aparicio. It is the largest commission to date for multidisciplinary artist Aparicio and will use installation, sculpture and murals to weave together narrative, science fiction and ecological speculation to explore the complex entanglements between bodies, environments and systems of care.

Often surreal and bodily, Aparicio’s work imagines new forms of cohabitation between humans, non-humans and the built world. In A Joyful Parasite the artist makes use of found and re-used materials – including glass, steel, wood and human prostheses – even re-using the gallery space’s previous paintwork and hand-writing on the walls to avoid single use vinyl. The installation features new sculptural works and animated figurines that evolve from the artist’s long-standing interest in the porous boundaries between humans and their environments.

Drawing from science fiction, biology, and bodily memory, A Joyful Parasite questions ideas of cohabitation, adaptation and dependency in a time of ecological urgency. Human and non-human elements forge connections between bodies and ecosystems, while mythology and folklore shape a fictional world, presenting hybrid bodies built upon semantically loaded material where what is human or not blurs. Metamorphosis and rebirth create links between animal, plant and human forms which inhabit the space.

Aparicio’s multidisciplinary work dwells on ideas of the organic, establishing analogies between corporeal and social mechanisms. For Aparicio, the body is a malleable source of wonder and horror in her practice that spans large-scale mural drawings and sculptures that often feature modified found objects and mouth blown glass.

Saelia Aparicio: A Joyful Parasite is commissioned by Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in partnership with Southwark Park Galleries, London, and The Burton at Bideford

Saelia Aparicio (b. 1982, Spain) is a London-based artist working across sculpture, installation, and drawing. The practice explores hybrid bodies—blending the human, organic and synthetic—and addresses transformation, abjection and ecological entanglement through a language that is both tender and grotesque. Works combine salvaged materials—such as prosthetic fragments, coloured glass, or outdated industrial parts—with CNC-cut metal, ceramics, and wood to form modular, flat-pack sculptures designed for touch and interaction. These hybrid structures aim to be materially stable over time, avoiding toxic decay while proposing ecosystems of care, adaptability, and embodied use. Always seeking to work with non-toxic, enduring materials that age without harm, like bodies learning to coexist with the world that made them.

Recent exhibitions include In the Blink of Collapse at the Ljubljana Biennale (2025), curated by Chus Martínez; Les Fleurs du Mal at Bold Tendencies (London, 2024); and Liquid Intelligence at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, 2023).