Every month we will feature an artist from our listings to highlight their creative practice and showcase their work.
Our first feature is Digital Artist Sylvia Theuri.
Sylvia is an artist who is Kenyan born and London raised, currently living and working in Coventry. As a result of her experiences themes around space, place, movement and how they interact with race, gender and identity politics are central to her work.
She has an affinity to bright, vibrant colours, a connection to her Kenyan heritage. She grew up surrounded by colourful ‘kanga’ (a traditional Kenyan fabric) and as is drawn to such colours, they influence the way she ‘sees’ the world around her. And it is these bright colours that are the colour palette that she uses to depict various locations.
She begins her work with the colour black digitally painted over existing maps of places. The colour black is a representation of her skin colour, of her identity and her presence challenging and redefining the locations she engages with. She then digitally draws and paints over the black with bright colour, and begins to depict various locations as she sees them.
Sylvia’s work ultimately hopes to be a re-imagining of spaces and places that already exist, but have been re-negotiated with boundaries and identities explored, contested, challenged and (hopefully) re-defined in some way.
Sylvia has recently completed a Nest Residency with Talking Birds here at Eaton House. You can find her blog on Talking Birds’ website summing up her residency here.
To conclude her residency, Sylvia has created an online exhibition which is also available in Russian to be promoted across the city of Volgograd.
You can view this here.