RHIANNON HUNTER

Conscious Isolation

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Rhiannon is a visual artist an co-founder of ‘Surface Matters’ 2020, a platform for exploring artmaking and materiality. Her artworks respond to physical and psychological connections to belonging. She is interested in the relationships between self, place and space. Her work is an ongoing exploration into notions of ‘home’ as a material or imagined entity that may be rooted, familiar, fluid or displaced.

Her work spans mediums to include print, collage, drawing, sculptural form and participatory research that involves working with individuals and groups. She often marries the familiar with that which is unknown to stimulate connections that offer a sense of knowing and obscurity. With a strong sense of aesthetics and sensitivity to making and material exploration, she balances control with freedom to invite the viewer to look afresh at their relationship to their surroundings.

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'The Thinnest Slice' (video, 2020) takes it’s title from a talk by Professor Karen Barad on time in lecture ‘Troubiling Time/s Undoing the Future’. This artwork is a short film that combines moving image, audio, text and stills shot from the artists mobile phone and montaged together to explore sensory experience and intimacy of being within physical and digital spaces during lockdown (during COVID-19).

It grapples with articulating the intimacy of micro moments she experienced in dialogue with her surroundings captured through the interface of a screen. Throughout lockdown scale and measurable lateral time became distorted and she worked in an experimental way using the budget microphone on my phone and screen to savour moments of heightened connection and disconnection within her surroundings and self, against the backdrop of the global phenomena. The work is an amalgamation of micro moments where the artist’s sensory perception had become attuned to the audio and textural interfaces surrounding me. The orchestra of a bee flying past, a tiny insect crawling across a chair, two cats caught in a standoff, were timestamps. Moments of intra-activity as all of us were unknowing agents in an exchange of intimacy. 

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These audio and film recordings are juxtaposed with texts that the artist wrote journaling her experiences during the lockdown. Rhiannon Hunter participated in a selection of, what was, a sudden flood of online groups and seminars reaching into stranger's homes through Zoom. She felt the disorientating nature of the screen that transmits her and others into multiple spaces at once. 

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Rhiannon graduated in Textiles from Goldsmiths College, University London in 2008. She has exhibited internationally and undertaken residencies in Denmark 2018, Perth Australia 2017, Sweden, and was selected for the Florence Trust Residency programme, London 2019.

Recent commissions include site-responsive works for Festival Stoke 2020 and illustrations of Peckham for the Big Family Press, South London Gallery, 2019.

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