About Ceinwen Birrell

Painting is a form of self care and of self analysis and learning for me. My work mirrors the ebbs and flows of my life. Therefore my process can at times be challenging but equally it is often full of joy and freedom.  

My paintings explore juxtapositions between things, liminal spaces that exist between harder, binary borders. With my work I find myself weaving together the ordinary with the surreal and psychedelic; playing between the realms of the conscious and unconscious mind; inhabiting a space between humour and grief; and where queer and radical merge with the conformities of life. My paintings contain echoes of myths, folk-lore and magick intermingled with the mundane day-to-day. Focusing on these liminal spaces often brings me to consider rights of passage. Watching my children grow and adapt to our modern world and its customs, has helped me to understand myself and my own experiences. This learning connects to my interest in human development- particularly in relation to our unconscious minds; how the life stories that play out around me connect with age old stories and beliefs from around the world. I’m interested in how unconscious knowledge connects to these stories through our behaviour and through our dream time and what this reflect back to us and why.

In terms of process I begin new work using a combination of references from collected images and personal photographs and from preliminary sketches a painting then develops. Often my early ideas or intentions shift and adapt as the process unfolds.

Overall, I am concerned with questioning and subverting classical archetypal understandings around family, tradition, faith and magick.