Bea Bonafini draws upon mythology, spirituality and ecological thinking to create shapeshifting forms that move between human, animal and imagined worlds. Working across tapestry, cut carpet, cork painting, ceramics and installation, her practice reimagines ancient archetypes through richly tactile and materially experimental forms. Plinian Fire (2022) is a wall-hanging textile in hand-tufted bamboo silk. Its two symmetrical halves feature flowing shapes that conjoin at the bottom of the work, and can be read as tumbling hair falling over pink flesh, or hot lava falling over volcanic rock. A Plinian eruption is a particularly violent type of event, characterised by their similarity to to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The starting point for the wider series of works from which this piece comes was idea of the labyrinth. Delving into Hermann Kern’s 1981 book on the subject during her 2020 residency at the British School at Rome, Bonafini researched this archetype, which goes back over 5000 years. She becomes fascinated by a line by Euripides, who describes the Minotaur as “a hybrid form, a monstrous fruit.” Bonafini likens the creature to “the way a fruit or a body rots and changes, where a succulent nutrient fruit becomes repulsive and toxic.”