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Gabriella Burns (B. 2001 Melbourne Australia) is a practicing fine artist based in Glasgow, Scotland.
Burns’ renders colourful oil paintings using diad or triadic colour schemes, employing the female form to build repetitive linear compositions which span across large scale canvases generating a tension between anatomical accuracy and abstraction.The use of formality and repetition in the works aims to create an ambiguity surrounding the living and the inanimate and her paintings can draw unsettling comparisons with dolls.
Burns’ uses specifically cropped historic source imagery from the 50s. She highlights visual similarities or rather a lack of differentiation between female representation in inherently sexual contexts and inherently non-sexual contexts. The use of negative space is a constant in Burns’ work, erasing the context of the image and stripping back the information given provokes the viewer to open their eyes to the seemingly perpetual objectification of the woman that remains a constant throughout the images.
Drawing from her own experiences and memories Burns’ work discusses female identity and the changing relationship between objectification and naivety in the time period between childhood, adolescence and womanhood. The work reflects an attempted comprehension of the male gaze through the lens of girlhood- the slow realisation of misogyny and the sexualisation of the woman that comes with observations and experiences that take place through these developmental stages. Highlighting the detrimental influence representation can have on identity.