The Last Place We Felt: On the Fractured Bodies of Lala Drona

In a world mediated by screens and scar tissue, Lala Drona renders the body not as it is—but as it’s remembered, erased, and rebuilt.

As more of our lives unfold on screens, we drift behind glass—voyeurs of our own realities. We scroll through curated feeds of beauty, tragedy and distraction. But what toll does this spectatorship take on the body? What lingers after the violence we witness and the images we absorb begin to settle beneath the skin?

We lose something—the immediacy of touch, the weight of physical presence. And yet, in that loss, might there be something else? A shift. A transformation. A quiet beginning. These are not abstract questions for emerging artist Lala Drona, whose work probes the disappearance of the body in a culture that privileges image over intimacy. Her practice explores what it means to inhabit a body in an era that filters, edits, archives—and often erases—what is flesh and lived.

Drona’s work is both personal and political. Diagnosed in adolescence with a rare congenital condition that left one breast undeveloped, she underwent reconstructive surgery at sixteen—an early encounter with the silent violences enacted on female bodies in the name of balance and acceptability. That experience—at once clinical and existential—reverberates through her practice.

Born in Denver and now based between Paris and London, Drona is completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. She belongs to a generation of artists shaped not just by the internet’s content but by its very architecture: the endless scroll, the collapse of time, the algorithmic rhythm of attention. Her work doesn’t stand apart from this world—it arises from within it, absorbing its codes, distortions, and dissonance.

Her recent exhibition in Paris, Virtual Reverence, did not critique digital life so much as mourn it. The paintings are elegiac: meditations on what is lost when presence becomes performance, and feeling is flattened into spectacle. Figures flicker and fragment. Backgrounds dissolve into shifting gradients. The surfaces are dense—layered, scarred, resistant. The body becomes signal, trace, and artefact.

Drona works across media—painting, performance, video, and text—constructing what she calls a “fictional ecology”. Her practice quietly echoes David Chalmers’s proposition that “information is physical”, and that virtual experience is as real as its analogue counterpart. Yet her work also gestures toward Nietzsche’s insistence that thought cannot be divorced from the body. Even our most digital selves, she seems to argue, remain tethered to sensation, vulnerability, and decay.

This tension underpins Androcentric Screams, a series created during her pre-master’s year. Inspired by Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women, a feminist history of medicine’s failures, Drona treats the canvas as both body and patient. She cuts into it, binds it in gauze and hospital gowns, then paints over its surface in oil. These gestures—incision, binding, repair—become rituals of reclamation, bearing witness to personal trauma and collective erasure.

One painting, Induce, refuses to be forgotten. A stretched, screaming figure dominates the frame, painted in agitated, deliberate strokes. The palette—clinical whites, glacial blues, bruised reds—conjures detachment, sterility, and emotional freezing. At its centre: a mouth, wide and raw, clamped by teeth. There are faint echoes of Munch’s The Scream, but Drona’s figure unravels from the inside. The pain is not cathartic but programmed—a scream rehearsed by a body no longer willing to stay silent.

In more recent work created during her MA, Drona turns to American cultural mythologies. In Miss America, 2025, the pageant icon is reimagined not as ideal but as rupture. The canvas is explosive—layers of fleshy strokes, jagged marks, smeared crimson and black. At first, the work reads as abstraction. But then: the curve of a breast, the outline of an eye, the hint of sinew or hair. A body emerges—fractured, resisting containment.

The title unsettles. Miss America calls up nationalism, beauty, decorum. Here, that ideal is gutted—turned inside out. We are shown not the image, but the internal wreckage. The date—2025—suggests a future just close enough to feel real. In this world, perhaps post-Roe and post-truth, the female body is no longer celebrated. It is contested. It is armed.

The painting does not comfort. It accuses. It bleeds. It demands that we look—truly look—not only at what sits before us, but at what sits beneath our collective gaze. The mirror it offers is cracked, but precise.

Where many artists comment on digital culture from a distance, Drona works from inside its slipstream. Her paintings give form to what she calls “the slippage”: the glitch, the memory blur, the echo of a dream. Her bodies are not intact—they are fragmented, uploaded, vanishing. And yet her work resists despair. In the friction between digital erosion and manual labour, she finds space for something else: regeneration.

She captures the paradox of the digital age: a body that is always visible yet never fully seen, endlessly exposed yet forever out of reach. Her work doesn’t resolve this tension—it lives there.

As she prepares for her degree show at the Royal College of Art, Drona isn’t simply mounting an exhibition. She is staging a reckoning—a confrontation with the illusions we’ve constructed and the bodies we’ve left behind. In her slippage, we recognise our own. Her painted figures, fractured and unmoored, don’t offer comfort. They don’t heal. She does not show us how to mend. She shows us the crack where the soul leaks through.

The RCA2025 Degree Show opens to the public from 19 to 22 June 2025 at the RCA Battersea Campus, London.

Discover more about emerging artist Lala Drona—her work, exhibitions, and latest projects—at the link below.

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©2025 Lala Drona