b. 1988, United Kingdom
The act of painting for Gabriella Boyd is an act of translation, from the interior or verbal, into the exterior and visual. Her paintings give visual form to internal sensations, memories, narratives and spaces held in the mind. Boyd explores and collapses the distinction between interior and exterior states by bringing together representational motifs with purely symbolic structures or diagrammatic forms. In an attempt to depict embodied experience and memory, painting enables the approximation of sentiment or language, allowing invisible sources of power and energy to flourish in indefinite but sincere, candid vocabularies.
Utilising a distinct, almost uneasy palette, her paintings, some imposing in scale, others quietly intimate, explore power relations between people and their environments; the charging or depletion of resources experienced within daily life spent in an urban city system. Pale greens, whites and yellows infuse select canvases with the luminous quality of artificial halogen bulbs, of street lamps and train carriages, refracted through hazy, geometric interiors that imply the doubling effect of windows or mirrors.