Puppetry · Photography · Art Installations
Prosperi
Light made visible. Paper made form.
The photograph that moves through space.
The practice
A practice that moves between the chemical, the sculptural, and the theatrical — always beginning with light on paper.
Working with the nineteenth-century iron-salt process, Leila coats paper and unconventional surfaces with photosensitive chemistry and exposes them to UV light — fixing the world in deep Prussian blue. Each print is unique, shaped by light, time, and the hand of the maker.
Paper · Sunlight · ChemistryStreet photography, ephemeral image-making, darkroom printing, film and digital — Leila works across the full breadth of photographic practice, drawn to the relationship between light and the image that emerges.
Darkroom · Analogue · DigitalDeveloped cyanotype paper — printed from personal photo albums and stock images — is cut and assembled into articulated puppets. These figures construct theatrical installations that invite not only optical encounter but spatial and tactile ones. The photograph leaves the wall and floats in space.
Paper · Sculpture · TheatreSelected works
Artist statement
Written by the artist, 2026.
Leila Prosperi is an emerging artist who blends photography with theatre and performance to create experimental artworks that engage audiences through tangible experiences. Employing cyanotype photography, interactive installations and paper sculptures, her practice crosses personal and collective histories, bringing together past and present to explore contemporary feminist themes through intimate narratives, historical research, and layered symbolism.
She considers the impact that cultural practices, including art, have on the formation of female identities, and how art does not exist in a vacuum but operates within a complex world of interactive relationships that articulate the social and political conditions of the world. She finds photography's fallacious assumption of realism, as a medium that exploits technological advancements, to be the perfect premise for humorous and, at times, surreal reflections on fictionality and masquerade in relation to broader issues such as womanhood, mental health and institutional power.
Leila's practice begins with photography, favouring cyanotype for its capacity to transfer images onto unconventional surfaces and transform them into something new. Extending beyond the photographic print, she works with collage and sculpture to construct paper puppets from personal photo albums and stock photographs that are printed as cyanotype, and cut to be assembled together.
The puppets are used to construct theatrical installations that invite a dialogue between viewer and artwork, an encounter that is not only optical but also spatial and tactile. Her practice demonstrates that photographs do not belong exclusively on the wall but can float in space, echoing their vernacular quality as family keepsakes meant to be held and to activate affective responses.
The artist
I'm Leila Prosperi — an Italian artist and photographer based in London. I graduated in Fine Art: Photography from Camberwell College of Arts, UAL in 2026, having moved from Italy to the UK to expand my practice.
I work across photography and art: street photography, ephemeral image-making with both old and new techniques, film and digital, darkroom printing and traditional processes such as cyanotype. From the photographic print, I build theatrical installations constructed from articulated paper puppets — figures that carry the image within their form.
My work engages with feminist themes, fictionality, and the social power of images — asking what photographs do to us, how they shape identity, and what happens when we make them move.
Contact
For commissions, exhibitions, installations, editorial, or to acquire a work — I'd love to hear from you.