Born in 1999, Niah McGiff is a London-based artist whose paintings and poems explore human desire, yearning, and compromise. Drawing from the language of water, she creates images where bodies and environments seem to dissolve or shift, reflecting an unstable sense of self and world. Through a surreal approach to figuration, her work examines how we perceive ourselves and others in an era where screens continually reshape intimacy and perception, where many long for depth yet find themselves wading in the shallows. Growing up in England with a mixed heritage, McGiff navigated life within predominantly white environments. Her work reflects on belonging not only in relation to identity, but also within broader contexts of digital culture, politics, and emotional life. She is deeply interested in the psychological and philosophical study of consciousness, particularly Joseph Levine’s concept of the explanatory gap, the distance between physical processes and the richness of subjective experience. McGiff’s practice seeks to bridge this divide: to reach across the space between inner life and outer expression. Through experimental and intuitive processes, she explores how diverse mediums and visual languages might articulate what is otherwise ineffable.