Anna Blom London, United Kingdom
Anna Blom is a Swedish born, London-based artist who holds an MA in Painting (RCA 2022) and a BFA (UAL 2020). Her observational portraitures function as a reflection of the liminal spaces we inhabit. An investigation of how we connect, combine and construct ourselves in this temporality. These ephemeral junctures interest Blom because they behave like a painted philosophy.
Anna Blom’s work is a continuous narrative of her own immediate surroundings. It is a deconstruction of the fragile details - the warp and weft - the physical and psychological components of our everyday landscape, using a diaristic method she studies the isolated, overlooked and less-celebrated lapses of time. An act of watching and trying to understand co-existence.
The research is an archival process of collecting photographs, sketches, white noise and writing which ultimately is poured into a painting. The multiple layers on the canvas are built up with stains of thin washes using raw pigment and permitting situational debris to flow in. This creates textured, gritty, matt surfaces allowing the materials to explore each other, the colours indicating seasonality, and the debris enhancing an awareness of place of production. The making itself becomes a memory of time and place.
These observational portraitures - mostly semi-abstract with undertones of symbolism - function as a reflection of the liminal spaces we inhabit. An investigation of how we connect, combine and construct ourselves in this temporality. These ephemeral junctures interest Blom because they behave like a painted philosophy, an unruly, particle-filled cosmoses or unseen atoms. It is as if these ordinary moments sit on a deeper truth, maybe even a better understanding, as they have been there for all of us, for all time.
