Gabrielle-Aimée Séguin

A closeup of a face milled in wood. The face rests on a blue painting made using oil, acrylic and spray paint.

Gabrielle-Aimée Séguin is a London-based artist whose work has previously been shortlisted for the Chaiya Art Awards (2020) and won her the John Kinross Scholarship to Florence (2018).

Gabrielle graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2018. During her BA, she embarked on an exchange abroad to study studio art in San Diego. The summer after, she returned to California as an assistant in Elliott Hundley’s Los Angeles studio.

Since coming to London, Gabrielle has hosted artist workshops for Leighton House Museum and has helped Shahrzad Ghaffari during the making of Oneness, an Art Fund funded public artwork for Leighton House Museum. She will also begin hosting artist workshops for the National Portrait Gallery.

Her work has been exhibited in Scotland and England, most recently in a live performance and the Royal College of Music in London.

Gabrielle in her RCA studio. She holds up a wooden face to a painted headpiece, demonstrating how the completed mask will look.

I intricately work oil paint into chaotic backgrounds of acrylic and spray paint to create figurative paintings. People and architectures that exist in the real world are mixed with imagined landscapes and symbols to represent the metaphysical experiences of friends and family.

Through witnessing my younger sister develop from child to teenager, I have become drawn to the themes and storylines in Coming-of-Age stories. I am particularly interested in making paintings which explore the structure of these narratives: The Call, The Refusal, The Threshold and Descent, The Trial and the Return Home. I encourage the viewer to explore the paintings sequentially like a graphic novel.

This year, collaborating with dancers, actors and musicians has also become an avenue for risk and experimentation. By bringing painting together with performance, which by nature is time-based, my work comes off the wall and evolves into an extension of the human body. I am captivated by how performers wear their art form, their movements becoming an expanded form of portraiture. I let them perform with my paintings, before they themselves are inserted into the paintings as mystical characters.