Gaia

Rosie Burns is an artist, a painter, printmaker, writer, and teacher a magpie for collecting images and ideas. Her work explores environmental themes and the human form. Rosie trained initially in Archaeological Illustration, specialising in prehistory. Her technical drawings published in global papers on the Neolithic period. After completing her PGCE in Art and Design at the University of Plymouth, late 1990s, she taught in various educational settings locally, nationally, and internationally. Rosie has exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions over the past three decades, alongside teaching.

 She established Rosie and Red Art and Leather studios in summer 2023 with her partner a micro tanner and leather craftsman, a step into full time self employment as an Artist.

Rosie’s work is experimental and adventurous, exploring different media but thematically consistent. Over the last decade,  focus on social justice: gender representation, and ecological issues, alongside formal oil paintings celebrating the natural world.

Her work was featured in the 2024 Venice Biennale, and selected for open exhibitions at the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE); alongside more local and national exhibitions, workshops, classes for social prescriber's and facilitating a life drawing day in her studio.

Concern is socio-political, address of assumed gender roles in Art and physical history: to depict women as thinkers, strong, singular entities not mother or queen or sex object, able to indulge and be guilty of sloth, envy, lust or power and intellect yet still maintain feminine beauty – like Sirens. Some titles connect to powerful women in history, feminist icons and femme fetales. Experiencing depictions of women in Degas delicate dancers and burlesque bathers, Rodin’s fallen in the gates of hell and sexualised drawings of women: Gustaf Klimt, Egon Sheila and Eric Gill; Henry Moore’s gigantic queens and powerful mothers cradling infants reinforce the same depictions investigated in Archaeology, not all women.

These prints allude to the depiction of form through line:  influenced by the women in Picasso’s blue period drawings and reductionist line drawings by Matisse. Alluring, majestic,  and challenging depictions of the female form; gold and silver of the feminine.

Monoprint and Gold

These prints are made by cutting and marking mount board – a waste product from picture framing, I draw out the image from life – so the prints have an immediate and direct feel, rather than working from drawings. The plate is cut and marked then sealed – inked with a roller, using a relief  process on damp paper to get a solid image from a thin profile plate. The prints are cardboard cut mono-prints, an edition of 8 is the usual maximum from one plate, I often edition only 5 with 1 proof  – before its too flattened and able to produce a clean image. I like the papery textures, an unpredictable torn surface un-obtainable in other relief media. The prints take a few days to dry, then a thin glaze of gold and sometimes silver oil paint added for a bit of feminine sparkle and lustre. It takes over a week to make an edition, each print I make is signed, numbered titled and embossed. I work with Cranfeild safe wash inks, 100% recycled hand made cotton rag Khadi papers and thinned gold and silver oil paint for all my Siren - or female prints.

30x24x4cm

Framed under glass