Artist Statement
We belong to an era where nature is mediated through technology, where a painting of a rose is a painting of a photograph of a rose, and the cry of a rooster in the morning comes through your mobile phone. My practice is an exploration of these everyday simulations that surround us.
I’m inspired by artificial representations of reality, particularly digital images such as stock photos, images from advertising, and pornography. These subjects fascinate me as they create a parallel world of imitations that depict life as static, sanitized, and smooth. An unattainable hyper-reality representing a perfect world, that is yet strange and uncanny.
There’s an absurdist humour in painting a mug shaped like a butt or a smiling woman on a toilet, but I am also drawn to these images because they have a sinister quality. Each of them has something troubling to say about the way we see the world, and in particular the way we see women. I explore these misogynistic images concealed in our digital everyday through my practice.
Through collage, overlay and the manipulation of light and colour I subvert images that represent an ideal and make them strange. Blue skies, white teeth, red roses, and beautiful smiling women are distorted to create paintings that evoke a dichotomy of attraction and revulsion. Through painting I examine the alienness of our collective ideas of perfection.
More and more, as the women of my paintings stare back at me, I realise that they are reflections of myself. Cruel, contradictory, and unattainable representations of femininity that reflect my own anxieties towards the expectations of being a woman in a digital age.
Instagram:
@lydiadurnall
CV:
Lydia Durnall, (b. 1998, UK)
Exhibitions
Upcoming FUSE, Regency Town House, Brighton
2021 By Yourself With Everyone, Goodmother Gallery, California.
2020 Face to Face, University of Brighton Edward Street, Brighton.
2019 Painting Festival 01, University of Brighton Grand Parade, Brighton.
Curatorial Projects
2020 Face to Face, University of Brighton Edward Street, Brighton.
Awards
2021 Nominated Freelands Painting Prize.
Education
Fine Art: Painting BA (Hons), University of Brighton, Brighton, 2018 – 2021.
Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, Coleg y Cymoedd, Nantgarw, 2015 – 2016.