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