Mary Stephenson was born in 1989 in London. She graduated from The Glasgow School Of Art with a Bachelor's degree in 2011 and currently studies at The Royal Academy Schools. She lives and works in London. While exuding a mood of tension and apprehension, Stephenson’s canvases are simultaneously undercut with a distinctive, dark comedy. Bright and highly saturated worlds shift and move between the familiar and the uncanny, which lead the viewer into an abundant space of exploration and discovery.
Sun-drenched rooms allude to rich fertile ground that swells and illuminates out of the canvas. Calling on the unconscious, Stephenson paints rapidly to chase internal dialogues, aiming to explore the tension and space in-between the unconscious and the woken world. How do these spaces bleed into one another and what is born out of their collision? Stephenson refers to the canvases as ‘pregnant spaces’ where she gives space for the unconscious to grow and reveal its hidden meanings. What appears is an uncanny and mysterious snapshot into Stephenson’s cinematic depiction of ones all consuming and excessive desire to fit in and belong.
