News flash! Coral Churchill’s digital prints are now available for sale at the Blue Rim Gallery. She’s a graduate from the creative power-house Central Saint Martins in London, and her work has graced exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts’s prestigious Summer Exhibition and the London Art Fair. We recently caught up with Coral to find out more about the inspiration and ideas behind her work.

Wasabi © Coral Churchill

Tell us a bit about your work…

My practice is inspired by the morphology of forms. I aim to capture emotions and gesture through paintings and drawing that express meditative or turbulent states of existence. I am interested in the way our world looks and how its surface appearance relates to inner psychical spaces. The ethereal and otherworldly, in relation to the seemingly mundane, is a concern in my work.

Which artists influence your work?

I am inspired by the work of Yayoi Kusama, Mali Morris and Hieronymus Bosch. I am also influenced by Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations and the artwork of Moebius.

You seem to move easily between drawing, painting and prints – what’s your approach to each medium and do they inter-relate?

The materiality of each medium informs my approach. Drawings are often more careful, paintings more gestural. Ideas stem from automatic drawings that form a strong focus across my practice. I am influenced by intuitive art, and often look to stream of consciousness mark making. The subject matter can vary, from imagined structures and landscapes to figurative work, and the choice of medium helps this exploration of themes. The print work is informed by an interest in Dada photomontage that brings in elements of the absurd and uncanny. The different mediums share a tension between an abstract language and suggestions of representations.

How did you come to create your digital prints? They seem to embody a different approach from your painting and drawings.

With the prints, I sample visual references from the natural and man-made world and place seemingly incongruous images together in a layered montage. The prints have evolved a different aesthetic look due to their photograph-based imaging, but share similar ideas explored in different mediums.

Can you tell us more about the prints showcased on the Blue Rim site?

These prints are photomontages that involve inkjet printing and scanning. The Papercut Mandala is a more meditative and calm piece in contrast to Volume and Wasabi. These two prints share more similarities as filled space of layered iconography. It became an amassing of objects chosen from a collection of images found over the years, a landscape filled with memories. I arranged images of the city with submarines and test cards into formations. Volume and Papercut Mandala were also printed on the cover of an arts magazine called ‘Volume’.

You exhibited work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2008. Can you tell us more about the work you exhibited there?

The painting was a portrait of a screaming chimpanzee. It was the first of a series of monkey portraits that seemed to focus on emotions such as anger and melancholia. In particular, this first portrait combined abstract quick mark-making that relates back to the automatic drawing with more careful, representational work.

Do you have any projects lined up in the near future?

I am working towards an exhibition with Blue Rim this summer while continuing an MA in Fine Art.

For more information about Coral’s prints and drawings, send Petra a quick email on: petra@bluerimgallery.net

For a link to the prints in our e-shop, click here.

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