Dionne Sparks is an artist and educator born in London. She gained a First-Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores University and completed the MA Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art in 2023, where she was awarded The Basil H Alkazzi Scholarship 2021.
She works in series through linked bodies of work and is invested in an embodied process-driven practice which transforms accumulated materials into abstracted poetic gestures. Ranging from flat palimpsestic ‘blackboard’ paintings to densely layered and draped textile assemblages, marks and gestures loop through the work tracing an expanding conversation in which identities are always forming.
The series 12 Generations: Letters to the Dead is a personal meditation on the legacy of slavery performing an intimate conversation in which the past operates in the present and echoes into the future. The paintings employ haptic strategies which thematise the body, temporality and memory through a range of materials including hand cream, ink, acrylic, collage, carbon and pigment. The artist builds liquid indexical paintings in which marks construct rich palimpsestic surfaces.
Images from the series 12 Generations: Letters to the Dead including: Shimmer, River Cross and Trembling with the Abyss, each 128cm x 112.5cm.
Instagram: @dionnesparksart
Website: dionnesparks.com
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