Soft Person

Executed in 2008, Soft Person is an exquisite early example of Phoebe Unwin’s ethereal painterly practice. The artist relishes the fluid, malleable properties of the medium, merging figurative and abstract techniques in a bid to transform everyday events into dreamlike realities. ‘Here person and place are almost indistinguishable’, says Unwin, speaking of the present work. ‘I had in mind how soft human bodies compare with the hardness of buildings.’ Unwin works from a combination of memory and observation: ‘I don’t work from photographs – for me photographs provide too much information; too many details’, she explains. ‘I often aim to get to the essence of a subject, going on a hunch that there is more to that familiar moment or thing than itself… Memory is a useful filter for me because it’s never an isolated phenomenon: it’s not just about what something looked like but also what it felt like, how big I felt in relation to it, its temperature or environment – painting the feeling of something rather than its appearance.’ Unwin’s inclusion in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2010 exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now propelled her into the public eye; her works are currently held in museum collections including Tate, London, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.