We are in a constant search for talent. I scroll through Instagram pages, look at every exhibition that gets suggested to me, google things directly, and even ask ChatGPT for recommendations. My only criterion: I need to like it. Just like it, and nothing else.

And that is exactly what led me to Miriam Dema, whose work I recently came across on the Arab World Artists page. I started scrolling through her world and suddenly felt like I was back home in the countryside with my grandmother — all of us sitting around the table, eating watermelon with the whole family. Her work is warm. It is very her. It practically levitates.

And, naturally, I wanted to know where all of that came from. So here is the story of Miriam Dema — who, it turns out, is a Spanish artist working with feeling rather than object. How did she end up in Peru training as a chef, accidentally leaving her art education behind? What brought her back to painting? And what role does her grandmother play in all of this? Here we go.

— So where did your relationship with art actually begin?

— Art wasn’t something I consciously set out to pursue. I simply loved drawing as a child and did it constantly, until at some point I stopped and, for quite a few years, barely drew at all.

It wasn’t until I was about 16, when we had an art class at school, that I picked it up again. I remember being genuinely surprised by just how much I enjoyed it and, perhaps more importantly, by how easy and familiar it still felt after all that time.

Around then, I also needed to decide what direction to take with my studies, and something in me was saying it simply had to be the artistic one. It made very little sense on paper — I had barely drawn for years — but somehow it felt completely obvious.

I was rather less convinced that my family would see it that way. Nobody had gone down that sort of path before, so I prepared this whole speech for my father about how much I wanted it and how hard I was prepared to work. I was expecting to have to persuade him, and instead he simply went, “Okay, perfect.” So that was that.

I did the artistic final stage of secondary school and then went on to study Fine Arts at university. Looking back, there was never really a master plan behind any of it; I simply kept arriving at these moments where I had to choose what came next, and every time art felt like the only answer that made sense.And even then, I didn’t enter university with this grand declaration that I was going to become an artist. It was far less calculated than that. I loved drawing, I loved painting, and it felt like the thing I knew how to do. So I kept doing it.

— You grew up with three siblings. Did any of them end up following a creative path too?

— Not initially. But my youngest sister is starting to follow that path now. She studied acting and is also into singing, so she is building a creative career of her own. It looks like we might be starting a new family legacy.

— There is a slightly funny story behind how I found your work: I discovered you through the Arab World Art page and assumed there must be some connection to the region. Is there?

— Apparently not! Until you mentioned it, I hadn’t even heard of the page. They never interviewed me, and I have never had any contact with them, so I genuinely have no idea how my work ended up there.

But I love that you discovered me that way. There is something quite interesting about your work travelling somewhere before you do — and reaching people through a part of the world you haven’t had a connection to yet.

— You studied Fine Arts, but at one point you stopped painting altogether. What happened?

— It happened around my third year at university. I became completely blocked and, looking back, I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the environment felt a bit hostile for me. I was very young, very sensitive, and my work has always come from quite an emotional and vulnerable place, so I didn’t really feel I had a safe space to experiment and work out what my own way of painting was.

There was always a sense that certain things were fashionable, or that there was a particular way of doing things that was more readily accepted. Nobody ever criticised my work directly, but I saw how easily other people’s work could be judged. It was subtle, but at that age it was enough to make me very conscious of what I was doing, and eventually I just couldn’t paint.

I stopped completely for about three years. For the last year and a half or two years of my degree, I didn’t paint at all and instead moved into mediums that were completely new to me. Spoiler: it was cooking/ Somehow they felt safer.

What is interesting is that the themes themselves never really changed. Even then, I was working around human connection, caring for other people and the emotional side of relationships — all things that still find their way into my paintings now.

— When you say the environment felt “hostile”, what do you mean by that?

— The people themselves were lovely, and I am sure if I found myself in exactly the same situation now, I would experience it very differently. But I was young and quite insecure, and there was definitely a sense that certain ways of making art were more accepted, or perhaps more respected, than others.

At the time, there was a particular aesthetic that felt very dominant: work that was clean, white, conceptual and quite intellectual, often engaging with political or social issues. I don’t want to reduce the whole scene to that, because of course there was much more going on, but the general feeling was that art was expected to come very much from the mind.

Over the years, I have realised that I work almost the other way round. Of course there are ideas and concepts behind what I make, but I don’t necessarily want to start with them. I’d rather begin with instinct and emotion, and then let the work surprise me — to discover what it’s actually about through the process of making it.

For me, art needs that freedom. It needs room for play, mess and mistakes.

— So you stepped away from art for a while — and that somehow took you to Peru. How did that happen?

— Honestly, it was a bit of a twenty-something whim. I had fallen completely in love with Peruvian food, and the more I discovered about it, the more curious I became. What fascinated me was how much could be happening on a single plate — all these contrasts and unexpected combinations. It can be incredibly refined and complex, but still feel very generous and homely. At some point, being curious from afar simply wasn’t enough. I thought, if I am going to learn this, I want to learn it properly.

Cooking was already very much part of my life. My grandmother was a cook, my mother is a very good cook, and I grew up around Catalan food. But precisely because it was so familiar, I never wanted to learn it formally. That was something I wanted to absorb from my family, in the way it had always been passed down.

Peruvian cuisine was the opposite. I knew nothing about it from the inside, which made me want to go straight to the source — to learn from people there, cook with the actual ingredients and understand the food in its own context. So, in my twenties, I thought: why not just go?

And I loved it. Ceviche was probably what first made me fall for Peruvian food — it is the obvious answer, but it is a classic for a reason. I also love causa. Really, though, I love the whole spirit of the cuisine. There’s so much happening that you often need a little time to digest afterwards, but that abundance is part of what makes it so joyful. It always feels like a celebration.

— What made you change your mind and return to art in Spain?

— I loved cooking, and I still do, but I began to understand that I loved it for very personal reasons — making food for people I care about, bringing people together, even just reconnecting with myself. A professional kitchen was a completely different world, and the pace of it wasn’t something I enjoyed.

Peru gave me something I hadn’t expected: freedom. I was away from the art scene I knew, with no pressure to follow a certain aesthetic or make the kind of work that happened to be fashionable at the time. And then I just started creating again. The weather in Lima is almost always grey, while the markets, fruit, vegetables and flowers were bursting with colour. I was quite nostalgic at the time, and somehow all of that caught my attention. I began putting it on canvas without thinking too much about what it meant or where it was going.

So there wasn’t really a moment when I thought, right, I am going back to art. It happened almost without me noticing. Cooking had taken me to Peru, but Peru ended up bringing me back to painting.

— Food was already such a big part of your family life. When did it start finding its way into your paintings?

— It happened very naturally. When I started painting again in Peru, I tried all sorts of things — self-portraits, different subjects — but somehow I kept returning to still lifes. I was fascinated by the colours and shapes of the products there, and because I was cooking every day, food was constantly around me. It was what I was looking at, thinking about and working with, so inevitably it began appearing on the canvas too.

But over time, I realised it wasn’t only about the food itself. I have always been drawn to tables and what happens around them. There is something very particular about the way people come together at a table. The way we relate to each other there is different, more intimate, more caring. The table transforms the energy almost instantly, creates a world of its own.

I think that is also why it connects so strongly to my family. Food has always been one of the ways we care for each other, particularly with my grandmother, so perhaps I was painting something much more personal without quite knowing it at the time.

— Your grandmother became particularly present in your solo show El Carinyo. What did you want to preserve through that exhibition?

— My grandmother was almost like a second mother to me. My parents separated when I was very young, and she was a huge support to my mum, so we spent a lot of our summers with her. She was just incredibly caring, one of those people who made you feel completely safe. I absolutely adored her.

She was also the best cook in the world. So much of the way she looked after us was through food. She would make pies, these beautiful lunches and dinners, and our holidays with her somehow always revolved around food, the smells, being in the kitchen, all those little rituals around preparing it. When I was small, I would help her with the easy things, and even now I remember tiny details, like the mint growing in her garden. I think a lot of the emotional connection I have with food, and that comes through in my work, probably started with her.

Years later, when I was working on El Carinyo, I realised I wasn’t necessarily trying to preserve a literal memory of her. It was more that I wanted to get back to that feeling of being with her.

While I was working on the show, I covered one of the walls with photographs from my childhood. I would sit there looking at them for a while, almost putting myself back into that time, and then I would start painting. Little things from those memories would find their way in: certain colours, food, the garden, things we used to do together. But I was never trying to recreate a particular scene. It was much more about memory and how it feels. It was incredibly intense, but also really beautiful. And I think, in a way, I finally processed losing her through that exhibition in a way I simply couldn’t when I was a teenager. It was very healing. She is still incredibly present in my life. I feel her around me a lot.

— Is there one painting from El Carinyo that feels closest to her?

— Yes. There is one very large painting I made right at the end, when most of the exhibition was already finished. I didn’t really have a plan for it; I just started painting, and it came together incredibly quickly.

Most of El Carinyo was about nostalgia, about looking back and trying to return to a certain feeling. But this one felt different. A sky started to appear, then a table floating within it, and suddenly it felt as though I wasn’t remembering my grandmother anymore — I was meeting her there.

It became this birthday celebration in the sky. She always made the same cake for our birthdays, so I painted that cake with a candle. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday in particular — mine, my brother’s, hers — it didn’t really matter. It was simply this moment of being together again.

That painting changed something in me as well. I became much less concerned with perfecting the form and started trusting the emotion instead. I stopped sketching everything beforehand and began painting directly onto the canvas, letting it take me somewhere. It is also where things first started to float in my work, which still happens now.

— Let’s take a closer look at some of your work. In La Tendresa, you began painting people. What were you exploring through those figures?

— La Tendresa means “tenderness”, and the exhibition was really about intimacy, care and that feeling of fitting perfectly with another person. You know those moments when you feel so close to someone that even your bodies seem to fall into place like pieces of a puzzle? It can be romantic, but it can also happen with a mother, a friend — anyone you share that kind of closeness with. I was fascinated by that sensation and wanted, in a way, to portray it.

It is actually very close to what I explore through tables. The imagery is different, but the idea underneath is the same: human connection, and what happens when people share a space or a moment. At the time, painting people was simply what I felt drawn to. Right now, it isn’t, and I try not to force a subject simply because I’ve explored it before. I am sure people will return when it feels right.

— And what about this one?

— This one is very much about the feeling of summer. I was thinking about the place where I spend summers with my family and how everything feels lighter there — you are relaxed, time slows down and things almost seem to levitate.

I love those little twinkles you get when the sun hits the water, the curtains moving in the breeze, even the very ordinary plastic chairs we have there. They are all little things I associate with summer and that feeling of being completely at ease.

I also used fabric to bring some of that lightness into the painting. The base itself is striped, so the stripes you see through the chair and the table aren’t painted, and the curtains include actual pieces of lace. I love working like that because the material becomes part of the painting rather than simply something I paint over.

— La Hora Mágica feels particularly personal. What is it about?

— It is that moment between day and night when the light starts to fade, the sky turns this very particular shade of blue and everything seems to slow down. I have always loved it because it makes me feel incredibly present, but the idea of la hora mágica — or “the magic hour” in English — actually comes from my father.

I have this memory of when I was little, we were in the car together at that time of day, and he opened the sunroof. He used to tell me that this was when the energy from the sky came down, so you had take it in if you could. I don’t even know if “magic hour” is the proper name for it or simply what he called it, but it stuck with me. Even now, whenever I catch that light, I think of him and this moment.

The painting brings together other little pieces of childhood too. There are loquats on the table, for example — we had a loquat tree at home when I was growing up, and I absolutely loved it. So there are all these small memories woven into it, but for me it isn’t really a painting about looking back. It is more about how those memories make you appreciate where you are now — that lovely feeling of being completely present.