Birthed

Rosanna Dean (b.1988) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, she works between painting, sound, and installation. She graduated from the Royal College of art in 2019 with an MA in painting, BA Fine Art Painting Camberwell 2013 and studied with painter Michael John Angel in Florence 2015. She was selected for the FBA futures in 2020. She began her career as an art director but moved into a fine art practice in 2012. She was artist in residence at the Florence Trust and awarded EU funding to develop this body of work in 2018. She is now artist associate at The Oxford Centre for Hindu studies. 

Her work interrogates how the images we’re surrounded by form our cultural framework and expectations, and the need to subvert historical narratives, and tell new stories that offer different perspectives. Her starting points are ecclesiastic paintings which proliferate a narrative around women’s roles. Dean breaks apart these images and repaints them. Through mirroring, repetition and rearranging fragments, ungendered bodies emerge as both pattern and person, dissolving biased historical narratives, ideas, and modes of representation, while examining how the individual is constructed, how it meets the world, and how its visible boundary is not its limit. The construction of her work is influenced by recurring patterns in nature, the visualisation of sound and our relationship with death and renewal.