Sirena Pearl is an interdisciplinary artist whose work merges digital and traditional mediums to explore the intersections of contemporary identity, technology, the environment, and societal norms. Her most recent body of work examines reproductive politics in the post-Roe v. Wade digital age, engaging with themes of bodily autonomy, societal control, and the commodification of reproductive bodies.
Growing up in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area, Sirena was encouraged to pursue art by her mother, a graphic designer, and her father. Her passion for art flourished early, culminating in her submission of a colored pencil self-portrait titled Shower to the 2018 Scholastic Art and Writing Contest. The piece received the National American Vision Award and a Gold Medal and was exhibited in a traveling display across the country from 2018 to 2020. After high school, Sirena began exploring her artistic body by participating in local exhibitions in the DMV area. She also served as an artist-in-residence at Palette 22, where she displayed her work and engaged with the local arts community. In August 2022, Sirena began pursuing a Painting and Printmaking degree at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Her time at VCU has been marked by the completion of a mural in July 2023 that highlights the influences and risks of the urban heat island effect in Richmond, VA, and receiving the 2025-2026 VMFA Visual Arts Fellowship.
A defining feature of Sirena’s work is the use of “spinal distortion figures”—exaggerated self-depictions that reference the severe curvature of scoliosis. These figures, crafted in 3D modeling software, inhabit a liminal space between human and artificial. Their hyper-realistic, wet skin textures and contorted anatomies evoke the uncanny valley, provoking both recognition and discomfort. By distorting these forms, Sirena challenges societal expectations and exposes the ingrained biases in digital representations of bodies often associated with reproduction.
The generic 3D models she employs—pre-designed tools frequently used in gaming and pornographic advertising—reflect idealized notions of bodies and reproductive function. These models, optimized for manipulation, perpetuate objectification, reducing bodies to consumable commodities. By stripping them of hair and reshaping them into grotesque, abject forms, Sirena subverts their intended purpose. Her figures confront viewers with their complicity in the dehumanization of reproductive bodies, both digital and physical, while critiquing the unsettling ease with which these figures are objectified.
Sirena’s creative process bridges digital and analog techniques. Using Blender, she constructs surreal, womb-like environments populated with symbolic objects like IUDs, tampons, Lysol, birth control pills, and vibrators. These digital compositions, rendered in hyper-saturated neon hues, serve as blueprints for her paintings. Through traditional painting methods, she translates the digital into the tactile, and the reverse, creating an exchange to blur the boundaries between the real and artificial.
In her most recent series, Into the Womb, Sirena crafts imagined womb environments where foreign objects interact with distorted figures, symbolizing the tension between autonomy and control. Objects such as candles, bread, wine, lanterns, and buckets carry layered meanings, playing on cultural and linguistic associations. The figures’ interactions range from humorous—eating bread and drinking wine amidst a yeast infection in Yeast Infection—to somber, as seen in Clothes Hanger, where a figure displays fear and desperation while entangled in a hanger, or in Lysol, where a figure is sprayed as a panicked attempt at contraception.
Liquids within these scenes assume transformative roles: semen spills from a broken condom into a pool of melting candle wax as a figure mournfully gazes at the flame; an orgasm manifests as a whimsical water park, with a vibrator spiraling through streams of fluid as figures leap and rejoice. Curdled discharge from a yeast infection splatters across a bakery environment, while blood fills lakes, oceans, bathtubs, and toilets, turning stigmatized fluids into unconventional landscapes.
These visceral environments reflect society’s discomfort with reproductive health and bodies, where joy and pain, autonomy and constraint coexist.
Sirena Pearl sirenapearl.com Richmond, VA EXPERIENCE ICA VCU Advisory Board Student Representative: September 2024 to Present Workshop Student Assistant: James Cabell Library, Richmond / January 2023 to Present EDUCATION Virginia Commonwealth University School of Arts, Richmond VA / 2022 – Current Yale Norfolk School of Art, Norfolk, CT / (forthcoming 2025) AWARDS 2025 Margaret M. Scruggs Endowed Scholarship in Painting
