Bio
Louise Reynolds (1998) is a figurative artist from Hamilton, Scotland. She studied at the Royal Drawing School on the The Drawing Year 21-22 and graduated from Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art in 2020 with first-class honours.
Habitually reading the news provides a point of departure for her work, by combining prevailing and fad narratives into a vision of a dystopian present and future. She is interested in the bewildering oversaturation of media we consume, and how little of it we can fully understand. Through this she strives to make works with glimmers of the familiar, with the core inspiration slightly out of reach. Elements of fantasy, distortion and the surreal combine with a dedication to observational drawing, to form a personal magical realism.
Reynolds combines the narratives presented to her in a way that captures both their anxiety and comedy simultaneously, but without representing their original source material. The titles often give clues toward the original sources. Condensing references to both high and low culture into each piece, Reynolds is particularly keen on removing hierarchical structures through her work. This is reflected in her choice of medium, often forgoing traditional oil paints in favour of pencils on wood.