Kerry Duggan

Having studied Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and worked both as a curator of contemporary art and as a teacher in London, Kerry has recently relocated to her family home in Gloucestershire to pursue her artistic practice.

Pursuing the traditional sight-size method of the Atelier school, an approach which seeks to accurately record and portray objective reality, Kerry's attention is nonetheless drawn to the subtle forms and textures that somehow obscure, erode or " veil " our perception of reality: the insubstantial nature and diaphanous texture of a drizzly raincloud, waterfall spray, withered petal, or weathered sandstone, for example. The extinguished flame of the candle in Rage...against the dying of the light reveals the impossibility of capturing and recreating that which has been lost.

The work, Mrs Dalloway, is the first in a series of paintings that honour the fictitious lives of literary heroines. The symbol of the rose appears throughout Virginia Wolf's novel in which Mrs Dalloway absorbs herself in the beauty of the present - a state familiar to the intense observation in which the artist engages when drawing and painting still life subjects.

Kerry's work was recently selected by the artist Conrad Shawcross RA as part of the Royal Academy Summer exhibition 2022. Her work has also been selected for the forthcoming exhibition Every Cloud at Bruce Castle Museum, London (opening November 2022) that commemorates the work of the Chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard whose seminal nineteenth-century scientific enquiry On the Modification of Clouds, named and classified different cloud formations. Kerry is currently engaged in creating a series of studies of clouds, in honour of Luke Howard, and in her ongoing observation of the almost immaterial.