Annabelle Keyes United Kingdom

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I am an interdisciplinary contemporary artist from the South Coast, and recent Fine Art graduate, living and working in London. My practice is primarily involved with site-responsive, practice-based research projects, exploring sacred encounters in the natural world and creative practice as a navigational device, through interrelations between themes of ecology, place, mythology and mysticism.

An integral motivating factor to my practise is the pursuit of locating, or generating, harmony. I am interested in a dialectical blurring of contrasting contexts, often searching for tentatively balanced grounds between opposites.

A sense of terrestrial divinity is integral to my work. I seek to reveal the imperfect symmetry that reverberates throughout the forms in the physical plane, often manifesting in my work alongside examples of metaphysical dualities such as nostalgia and utopia, grief and belief, local and remote, past and future. I have always been drawn to investigate our relationship to place, notions of belonging and ancestral knowing, and the persistent human urge to explore and discover.

My artworks are realised as amalgamations of fabricated, curated and recorded information, synthesising a variety of disciplines. These pieces are grounded by historical, philosophical, cultural, ecological and spiritual reference points, while simultaneously subverting or transforming these narratives. Often responding to specific locations, I consider fieldwork and first-hand research as integrally creatively generative and emotional experiences, entangled with my own personal histories and biases.

My installations materialise through sculpture, found object assemblages, photography, video and painting, creating eclectic spaces of sanctuary and ambiguity, inviting curiosity while reflecting the findings of my ongoing enquiry.