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Sillygoose’s artwork Between Tides and Tempers was physically exhibited at the 2026 Fira del Llibre de València as part of Stories of the Mediterranean, a collaborative exhibition between APIV and Malta Illustrators.

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Between Tides and Tempers Exhibited at the 2026 Fira del Llibre de València

A Mediterranean work of water, feeling, and inner weather, presented through an international illustration exchange between Malta and Valencia.

Valencia, Spain — April 2026 – Sillygoose’s artwork Between Tides and Tempers was physically exhibited at the 2026 Fira del Llibre de València as part of Stories of the Mediterranean, a collaborative exhibition between APIV and Malta Illustrators.

The exhibition was inaugurated on 30 April 2026 at 12:00 at Jardins del Real / Vivers, as part of the 2026 Fira del Llibre de València, and remained available to visitors until 10 May 2026.

The project brought together 63 graphic works by professional illustrators from APIV and Malta Illustrators, proposing a shared view of the Mediterranean as a space of cultural connection, storytelling, and collective imagination.

Sillygoose was featured with Between Tides and Tempers, a digital artwork exploring emotional contradiction through sea imagery, facial expression, and layered visual movement. The work reflects the feeling of carrying tides inside the self, where calm, frustration, wonder, and unrest rise together beneath the surface.

 

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The Artist

Practice and Position

Sillygoose is a multidisciplinary, globally published and acknowledged artist working across digital media, illustration, visual storytelling, and design. The practice is shaped by movement across cultures, close attention to nature, and a sustained curiosity for the quiet architectures of everyday life.

The work often moves between playfulness and tension. It uses character, texture, color, and symbolic environments to hold emotion without overexplaining it. Faces, animals, landscapes, and abstract details become vessels for mood, memory, and inner weather.

Within this practice, art becomes a threshold between what is seen and what is felt. It does not flatten emotion into a single meaning, but allows contradiction to remain alive.

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The Work

Exhibited as part of Stories of the Mediterranean

Between Tides and Tempers

Between Tides and Tempers presents a face partly submerged in an imagined aquatic world. Fish, reeds, water, and shifting marks gather around the figure, creating a sense of emotion moving like a tide through the body.

The work holds a tension between innocence and unrest. Its soft colors and playful surface are interrupted by an uneasy expression, suggesting that emotional life is rarely neat. Feelings do not arrive one at a time. They overlap, flood, recede, and return.

Rather than explaining the subject directly, the piece allows the viewer to sit with the instability of mood. The sea becomes both setting and metaphor: beautiful, restless, alive, and impossible to fully control.

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The Exhibition

Stories of the Mediterranean

Stories of the Mediterranean was a collaborative exhibition with APIV, physically presented at the 2026 Fira del Llibre de València. The exhibition invited illustrators to respond to the Mediterranean as a shared sea, a cultural bridge, and a place shaped by beauty, movement, memory, and difficulty.

The exhibition was inaugurated on 30 April 2026 at 12:00 at Jardins del Real / Vivers and remained available to visitors until 10 May 2026. Its public setting allowed illustration to move beyond the page and into an open cultural environment shaped by books, readers, artists, and festival visitors.

The project brought together 63 graphic works by professional illustrators from APIV and Malta Illustrators, offering a shared look at the Mediterranean as a space of cultural connection, narrative, and common imagination.

The exhibition also received support from the AC/E Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture / PICE, with participation connected to the National Book Council of Malta.

In this context, each artwork became part of a wider visual conversation about the sea that joins communities while also holding histories of distance, displacement, myth, memory, and survival.

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The Collaboration

APIV × Malta Illustrators

The exhibition marked a creative exchange between APIV and Malta Illustrators, bringing Maltese and Valencian illustration into dialogue through a shared Mediterranean lens.

For Sillygoose, the exhibition represented a meaningful moment of international visibility. The work was not only shown digitally or online, but physically displayed in Valencia during one of the city’s major book and cultural events.

The outdoor presentation gave the artwork a public presence, allowing visitors to encounter Between Tides and Tempers as part of a broader walk-through experience of illustration, books, culture, and Mediterranean storytelling.

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The Voice

“The sea is never only water. Sometimes it is the face we show, and sometimes it is everything we are trying to keep beneath it.” — Sillygoose

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The Buzz

Context, media, and circulation

The exhibition was announced by APIV and also carried by Fundació FULL, placing Stories of the Mediterranean within the official cultural ecosystem surrounding the 2026 Fira del Llibre de València.

The exhibition also received cultural coverage from Verlanga, which framed Històries del Mediterrani as a shared Mediterranean visual conversation within the 61st Feria del Libro de València.

The wider fair itself was covered by Valencia Secreta, noting the scale of the 2026 edition at Jardins del Real / Vivers, with more than 100 exhibitors and an extensive cultural programme.

Sillygoose’s inclusion placed Between Tides and Tempers within this broader Mediterranean context, where illustration became a way to speak about belonging, emotion, landscape, memory, and movement.

In this setting, Between Tides and Tempers became both image and encounter: a small emotional world carried into a larger Mediterranean story.

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Publication Notes

Exhibition and feature details.

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