ALICIA ALFONSO, SOMMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS

Alicia Afonso is a Boston-based visual artist working mainly in painting. Her work often explores themes of sacrifice, identity, and visibility, with a focus on the female body as both vessel and offering. She often draws from religious iconography and ritual imagery to question how devotion and care can transform into something consuming, where beauty is luminous but edged with unease.

In works like Bite the Hand (oil on canvas) and I Am, I Am, I Am (sculptural textile), Afonso explores the tension between reverence and erasure, presence and unraveling. Her figures and forms hover between reliquary and ruin, reflecting her interest in how bodies, objects, and images are adorned, preserved, and sometimes hollowed out by sacrifice. This balance between rapture and ruin echoes the haunting atmosphere at the heart of D E L I R I U M.

Alongside her fine art practice, Afonso runs Blue House Art, a growing studio focused on murals, commissions, and client-based projects. Through this work, she has painted murals and hand-painted installations for public and private spaces in Boston and Connecticut. She continues to expand her practice into collaborative and site-specific projects.

Afonso’s work invites viewers into spaces where devotion is both radiant and unsettling, echoing Poe’s fascination with obsession, beauty, and madness. Her practice creates forms that are captivating and uneasy all at once, teetering on the line between rapture and ruin.

Bite The Hand, 34 x 37 in., oil on canvas // $2,500

I Am, I Am, I Am, 16 x1 3 x 11 in., fabric, beads, sequins, fiber fill, on wood stand // $350