Cecilia Reeve

Cecilia Reeve (b.1996) is a London-based Artist exploring the intersection between Painting and Animation. She is currently undertaking her MA in Animation at the Royal College of Art, she completed her foundation at Falmouth University (2014) and studied Illustration (BA) at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2018.

Cecilia has sold work to private collectors and institutions such as Soho House and has exhibited her paintings with galleries including the Delphian Gallery in London. Since 2020 Cecilia has made several collections for Partnership Editions. Her work has been featured in ‘Its Nice That’; Harper’s Bazaar; Elephant; Creative Boom; Stylist online and The Evening Standard. Her animations have been shown globally at a variety of film festivals including Sundance Film Festival 2022 and the London Short Film Festival 2023.

Cecilia Reeve explores the ethereal worlds of emotion, longing, and dreaming in her work, creating mysterious and at times unsettling atmospheres in her work. During her time at the RCA Cecilia has been delving deeper into her combined practice of painting and animation and exploring the notion of ‘animated painting’, combining materials such as oil on glass, and digital and painted backgrounds to create immersive pieces. Using the boundless possibilities of animation as a tool to bring static pieces to life that are untethered from canvas or paper.

Cecilia is captivated by the literary genre ‘Magical Realism’ and drawn to the moments in between: where dreams and reality collide and the ephemeral shadows that we leave in places passed by. Immersion in water is a pathway into portraying the Unconscious mind; as suspended in water our bodies become fragmented and out of time with the physical world. In her work Cecilia considers the female gaze and in turn her own body, using it as a source of reference and movement, examining and claiming the ways in which the (her) body can be seen and unseen.

Porous trailer

Porous

‘Porous’ is an animated film exploring the aftermath of sexual assault on the perception of self. In a dreamlike narrative, a woman takes a bath and reflects upon past experiences, submerged in the water she enters a space out of time. It is an existentialist film that questions the boundaries the between body and the outside world, between water and skin.

Through the combination of paint on glass, gouache, and digital animation Cecilia creates paintings that fully immerse the viewer.