Rebecca Parkin British, b. 1973

Rebecca Parkin’s fictional cycles focus on the female figure of subversion and enchantment. Popular depictions become a source from which to survey and negotiate the ever-changing experience women have with their colourful counterparts. She focuses on facial expression with her imaginary portraits, presenting them as curious, beguiling, and assertive. Her pastel drawings concentrate on a seductive physicality which holds the viewer in aesthetic arrest, her women often looking straight back, knowingly meeting our gaze. They operate in a metafictional universe, aware of their cultural and historical significance. Made in series, her narrative cycles employ multiple technical devices: colour theory, character construction, genre styles of presentation and storytelling. Familiar characters like the witch and the mermaid are re-evaluated as empowered yet complex and troublesome figures which occupy a liminal space in the modern world. Through a kind of creative anthropology, narratives from popular culture, mythology, art history and social fantasy are stirred together into a strange brew, both familiar, and reconfigured. Her work was recently the subject of the solo exhibition The Cult of the Green Women at the Zabludowicz Collection, London.