Phoebe Unwin

The title of Phoebe Unwin’s project holds many different connotations. The “field” could be a landscape, but also a color field, or the field of vision. It is an in-between place, a traditional subject in painting, which allows the artist to hover between figuration and abstraction, to investigate the formal aspects of her medium. Investigating the concept of landscape and how the human figure interacts with its surroundings, Unwin uses painting to construct a delicate alternation of horizons, whose varying distances elicit different paces of observation. The layered, porous surface of her works and hazy depiction of her subjects also generate a dynamic kind of vision within each painting, and an intimate link between the works. Through a process that moves from abstraction to figuration, where matter becomes sign and figures swim up out of color, Unwin creates images that seem to float within an indeterminate space and time. Her paintings are visual places whose possibilities are infinite; the intrinsic story of the works is neither defined nor definitive and new versions of it are constantly revealed, emerging through the viewer’s active gaze.