Over the next week we will be featuring the work from a select few of the artists from our Painted Surface exhibition, which is open until Saturday 15th August.

Our first featured artist is Ilona Sunderland, a soon-to-be final year BA Fine Art student at Nottingham Trent University. We selected her due to her three-dimensional take on painting, and the way that the audience could interact with her work from various angles.

Check out her artist statement here:

Fascinated by human interaction and our evolution as a species in relation to our ability to converse and communicate with one another leads me to using the face as a central aspect of my work. I am not limited to specific mediums as such; the subject matter of each of my works determines the materials used and the form the works take.

I’m interested in still image’s power to infer a narrative without the assistance of sound or movement, placing human interaction in a contradictory context. Playing into the idea of absence is presence; I examine the empty spaces of conversation and our natural desire to fill in the gaps. I recreate these spaces to provide a place of reflection the goal is to provoke question, contemplation, to make us become aware of ourselves.

What Are You Talking About? forms my most recent work; intending for the audience to inhabit the space within the installation, to rely on their experience of what they know, in order to piece together the given fragments.