ARTIST BIO

Breanna Gordon b.1999 is a figurative oil painter with dual British and Canadian nationality. Her work was recently exhibited in the 2023 London Biennale where she won the Chianciano Art Museum for her painting titled “Deep Chaos Within.” She will exhibit in the Chianciano 2024 Biennale next summer in Tuscany. Breanna completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at Queen's University in Ontario (2020), and is currently enrolled as a Masters of Fine Art Painting student at University of the Art's London's Camberwell College of Arts, UK.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is rooted in the exploration of realism and my interest in rendering the human figure with a likeness to nature. Heavily informed by historical representational painting, I merge the melodrama of the Italian Baroque with the Pre-Raphaelite’s sense of ethereality to create compositions that blur the line between reality and a dreamlike state. Looking within and to other artists, writers and poets, I describe the feeling of perpetual anxiety through overwhelmingly busy compositions that see my subjects lost within intricate, layered patterns. Specifically I am attempting to describe a dissociate disorder called derealisation that I experienced, in which one feels detached from the world and their body, a strange phenomenon that feels like you are dreaming while fully conscious. I have been using poetry as a vessel to inform my work, as it is often a source of rich visual imagery, and has been responded to in the past by the Pre-Raphaelites that I look to for inspiration.
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I am actively engaging in a return to the past in terms of aesthetics and ideals within art making and what art should be defined as. Appropriating William Morris designs led me to a direct comparison between his rejection of the newly industrialised world and the digital age we are living in, which is a significant contributor to society's collective anxiety. I have been thinking more deeply about why my work is deeply rooted in historical aesthetics and why I am returning to the past in my practice, and have come to the realisation that returning to traditional techniques in fine art painting, but also this idea of honing a skill or a craft is a form of escapism, or a means of exercising control, which is ultimately something one lacks when anxiety takes over.

London / United Kingdom