Valeska Hykel is a painter and printmaker specialising in screen printed
monotypes. Working at the boundary of painting and print, she paints directly onto silkscreens, subjecting the traditional screen printing process to a series of material interventions. Delving beyond the first pull of the print, she allows her images to degrade, leaving behind patinas that carry the delicate weight of memory and time.
Her practice is built on bold, gestural mark-making and a willingness to
relinquish control: to let the print behave as it will, and to find beauty in what resists her hand. It is a way of working that took its current form after Hykel became a mother - a period that stripped back the time and facilities available to her, and in doing so sharpened something else. Working faster, with less, she found herself painting with a new intuition, guided less by plan than by instinct - one she traces to the acute awareness of both the fragility and clarity that motherhood brings.
That shift runs quietly through everything she makes. Hykel's own path to motherhood, years of fertility struggle and IVF, an apprenticeship in longing, taught her something about creation that now shapes her printmaking: that to make something is to invest yourself in a process you cannot fully control, but must nurture regardless. Her screens hold paint the way a body holds hope: imperfectly, provisionally, and without guarantee of the image that will emerge. Surrendering to the agency of the work, she has said, is not so different from surrendering to the agency of a body trying to grow a life. Both ask for patience with imperfection, and a kind of faith in what is beyond your shaping.
This sensibility finds a natural home in her collaboration with La-Eva. Where La-Eva's formulations draw on the fertility of the plant world - extracts and botanicals grown, gathered and coaxed into potency - Hykel's monotypes echo that same cycle of tending and release: pigment laid down, left to bloom and degrade across the silk, each print a unique, unrepeatable record of growth. Both practices trust in process over perfection, and in the quiet intelligence of things left to become themselves.
Hykel's recent solo exhibitions include BSMT Gallery and Print Club London, where she was formerly Artist in Residence. As well as hanging in the Waldorf Astoria, London, her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Royal Society of Arts, Modern Art Oxford, Chelsea Design Centre, Unit 1 Gallery, Affordable Art Fair and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair for four consecutive years. She was invited to contribute to the AOP Gallery charity auctions for International Women's Day, and was a winner of the Delphian Open Call 2025.
Valeska Hykel's collaboration with La Eva brings this language of growth, imperfection and quiet resilience into a space dedicated to the same.