Artwork is available to purchase directly from the artist, Cicek Gallery or Hypha Curates.
Artist Statement
My work shifts between classical realism and modern surrealism, dismantling traditional portraiture to explore emotional containment, dissociation, and bodily defence. Realistic figure painting is essential to my practice. I aim to create a physical resonance, allowing viewers to feel the tension or stillness within their own limbs instinctively. Together, the paintings build a self-contained ecosystem operating under its own symbolic logic, examining how early family dynamics shape adult behavioural patterns.
Within this internal map, the human body undergoes a visceral metamorphosis, appearing headless, blindfolded, or tangled in ancestral root systems. The recurring bull terrier motif, inspired by a past pet, embodies a juxtaposition of hostility, warmth, vulnerability, and working-class identity. This concept plays with the personification of our untempered emotions. Mythologising familial turmoil, I use hybrid, flowing forms to externalise our complicated need for home. Echoing these figures across mirrored canvases and caves contrasts the red-flooded anxiety of Fight-or-Flight with the total blue paralysis of the body in other works, capturing the exhausting tension between a longing for domestic security and claustrophobic entanglement.
I use wordplay to explore these themes. Having lived in a mobile home as a child, I painted Immobile Home, transforming a symbol of freedom into a form of domestic tension. I apply a similar approach to The Apple Didn't Fall Far From The Tree, looking at the nuances of common familial phrases. More broadly, I play with how phrases like "Roots," "Growing," or "At The Door" function simultaneously as literal physical descriptions and blurred metaphorical boundaries.
Artist Biography
Rebecca (1993) is a London-based painter, textile artist and dyer for film and television. Rebecca is represented by Cicek Gallery and won their Silver Art Award. She is currently studying Advanced Painting through a scholarship at the Essential School of Painting in London. Rebecca has exhibited with the Royal West Academy of Arts, the Old Truman Brewery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, CASS Art, and Creative Debuts. She has completed residencies with Artspace Lifespace at Bristol’s Arts Mansion and GRAMPUS Heritage in Romania, and has taught painting workshops in Croatia. A former UK Artist Ambassador for the EU’s Intellectual Property Office in Spain, she has directed a short surreal film for Channel 4’s Random Acts and was featured in Beautiful Bizarre and AnOther. She occasionally teaches costume painting and dyeing for film at Pinewood Studios with the Creative Media Skills Institute. Rebecca has worked on major films and projects in the UK, Czech Republic, Hungary and across Saudi Arabia for production companies such as Warner Brothers, Marvel and Paramount.
Film & TV work
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm6542031/
