Lydia Stonehouse
Lydia Stonehouse (b. Cambridge, UK) lives and works in Brighton having received her BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton (2022) and is the receiver of the Cass Art X Phoenix Studio Award 2022.
As a contemporary visual artist who works primarily with paint, towing the line between abstraction and figuration, Stonehouse’s practice is concerned with painting as a way to visualise everyday highly sensory moments and the cross over of the internal world and physical world stimulated by them. Stonehouse’s work holds space for being present through triggering greater bodily awareness, acting against the digital age that divides our attention and isolates our senses.
Stonehouse’s paintings house ordinary moments of heightened sensory awareness embedded within a tactile surface and a history of marks made through a process driven approach to painting. Actions such as dragging paint on-and-off the canvas, sloshing luminous veils of oil and applying slurries of marble dust and glue that both resist and interact with the surface, build up layers that force an increased state of attentiveness to the work. The search for recognisable forms such as window frames, flower petals, kitchen tiles, and locks of hair are interrupted with abstract sensibilities which divert such a didactic reading and give space for experience without complete interpretation.
Hands full keyring
2022
Oil on canvas
91 x 76cm