Aurora Valentine (she/her) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the emotional residue of human connection through abstract mark-making, layered surfaces, and recurring symbolic forms. Raised in rural Northern California in a radical queer household, her practice is rooted in intuition, ritual, and the unseen energies that move between people.

Aurora is currently pursuing her MFA through Johnson State University in Vermont. Her work is grounded in a process of becoming, including an ongoing journey of reconnecting with her Choctaw heritage. This unfolding relationship with Indigenous worldviews continues to shape her understanding of presence, memory, and transformation in both life and art.

Conversation is at the heart of Aurora’s creative process. Each painting begins in response to a lived exchange, a sentence, a silence, a shared moment that leaves a mark. Through movement, layering, and revision, her work becomes a visual record of those encounters. She sees painting not as a static expression but as an active, unfolding dialogue between self, memory, material, and the unseen.

Her paintings begin in chaos through pouring, scribbling, and listening, and move gradually toward moments of quiet clarity. Recurring motifs such as the ghost or tombstone, a witness between worlds, and the squiggly line, a trace of laughter, breath, or aliveness, offer a visual language for emotional complexity. She paints as a form of meditation, conversation, and devotion, honoring both lived experience and ancestral connection.

Aurora currently lives and works on unceded coastal Chumash land, where she continues to explore art as both healing practice and sacred record.