About Lorna Carvill

Lorna Carvill is a London-based artist and recent graduate of MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, where she also gained her BA in Textiles. Before beginning her postgraduate studies, Carvill worked at Alexander McQueen, developing an interest in textiles that now informs her art practice. Across paintings, sculptures and installations, the artist interrogates the affective potential of materiality, often staging shows in alternative spaces – from a disused car workshop to an old barn – that illuminate the works in alternative ways.

Carvill’s practice examines painting as a material object within an expanded notion of contemporary painting. She uses elements such as form and colour to express the evocative potential of the tactile, sensual and physically affective elements of the artwork. In her research, Carvill positions the materiality of painting as a nexus between imagination and reality. By combining various, non-representational elements through an empirical, process-driven methodology in her paintings, she constructs compositional built environments. Using the traditions of post-structuralism and post-minimalism as a point of departure, the artist considers how painting performs both as object and as an image – or haptic and optic in light of the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty – in order to ignite an embodied experience and manipulate the apparent primacy of materiality.