Joanna van Son is a fine artist based in London. Van Son was born in Oman to Venezuelan/Irish and Dutch parents, and grew up in China, Russia, and the UK. Having sustained a lifelong passion for the arts, van Son commenced her current artistic practice while studying architecture at the Bartlett. Exploring the female figure inside and out - her earliest studies were critically ambivalent self-portraits - her paintings and drawings distort the familiar spatial qualities of the human body, paying particular attention to the material and symbolic textures and sensitivities of the skin.
The artist developed a vital appreciation for process in her work. She paints on thin unprimed cotton canvases nailed to the plaster walls of her studio. Once complete, each canvas is peeled off the wall and stretched onto a wooden frame. This unique practice exposes all the strokes and steps she has made, while also leaving a positive imprint, a trace, on the wall, which becomes the site of an extraordinary palimpsest. Ultimately, her fascination is with the playfully-violent grey zones of reality-making that are made visible by the practices of art and architecture. Van Son draws upon her engagement with both disciplines to paint the 'forces' that lie beneath meaning and affect and give them their structure, revealing the often-occluded processes that constitute human experience.
