Maisy Romero-Cross is a BA Fine Art student in her final year at Central Saint Martins. Her practice explores identity, twinhood and the rural Cornish landscape through a lens of folk-horror, the gothic and the uncanny. Growing up on Bodmin Moor, she experienced the landscape as both seductive and hostile: a place of natural beauty, ritual and myth, entangled with histories of nationalism, xenophobia and social austerity.

As a twin, Romero-Cross is drawn to the tension between the individual and the collective, imagining the self as part of a hive mind or an organism with many bodies but one soul. This manifests through doubling, role-play and bodily transformation within her paintings. Figures fracture, repeat and merge, blurring boundaries between self and other, human and animal, birth and decay.Her work often draws on rural gothic imagery, barns, animals, storms and winter light, where the pastoral becomes grotesque. In her submitted painting, a horse gives birth to the artist while another version of herself acts as midwife, staging birth as a cold, ritualistic and unsettling act. Set within an ambiguous rural interior, the scene evokes cycles of life, labour and inheritance, where care and violence coexist.
 

Working primarily in oil paint, Romero-Cross embraces its slowness and physicality as a meditative process, allowing time for introspection and the accumulation of unease. Through the bodily, the mythic and the grotesque, her work aims to conjure a sense of the supernatural and the gothic, inviting viewers to question how identity, community and ideology are shaped within landscapes that appear timeless, frozen and beautiful.