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Edith Dormandy is a London-based painter with a technical training in Western Classical drawing and painting, an Art History BA and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art.

I paint things which I want to hold close and simultaneously push away: objects, images, people, but also histories, legacies of power, beliefs. I usually work directly from a physical thing or person that evokes that feeling. A successful painting is one which holds it in quiet tension - often I wait for the work to 'float' - hopefully producing in the final outcome, a resonant encounter across time, but one inherently restrained by the picture's flatness.I work in varied modes and scales, usually within the limits of rectangular paintings or drawings. This variety is important, both to do justice to the range of encounters where I experience that conflicted feeling, and to allow conflict between as well as within the works.The painting process is itself one of tension and contradiction: it can feel like an act of violent chemical preservation as well as of tender attentiveness. It allows me to be more intensely here with my subject, but through painting it, I am putting it there: behind the picture plane. This dual function of painting simultaneously to re-embed me in the world and to hold it at bay is what keeps me coming back, and it is in the suspended place between that I hope my paintings reside.

CV

Exhibitions

2024, RCA Public Facing Exhibition, London

2024, Things That Matter, AMP Gallery, London

2022, Lookers!, Islington Art Factory

2021, The Big Studio Art Sale, The Arc Centre, London

2021, Contemporary Portraits, Fronteer Gallery, Sheffield

2020, Solskifte, Online Exhibition https://www.solskifteexhibition.com

2020, RWS Contemporary Watercolour Competition, Bankside Gallery, Southwark

2019-2020, ARC 14th Salon, MEAM, Barcelona and Sotheby’s NY

2019, She London with Art for Cure, Bankside Gallery, Southwark

2019, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours 207th Exhibition, The Mall Galleries

2017, BODS, Safe Houses, Peckham

2017, Arcana, The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church

2016, Ham Sweet Ham, 2 person show, joint with Jake Lamerton

2016, Metamorphosis, UCLU Art Society Show, The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church

2015, Working Men’s College Show, Camden Working Men’s College

2015, Escape, UCLU Art Society Show, The Gallery on the Corner

2014, Destruction Day, UCLU Art Society Show, UCL Portico and Main Quad

2014, LOST Teaser, Please do not not touch, Secret Location

2014, Alchemy, UCLU Art Society Show, St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church

 

Selected Prizes, Scholarships and Residencies

2023  The Vice Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarship, RCA

2022  High House Residency

2020  Royal Watercolour Society Recent Graduate Award

2019  2 x ARC Purchase Awards in the 14th Annual Salon

2018  ARC 1st Prize scholarship https://www.artrenewal.org/Scholarship/Entrant/188

Education

2023-2024: MA Painting, Royal College of Art

2016-2020: Fine Art Diploma, The London Atelier of Representational Art

2013-2016: BA Hons History of Art, University College London

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