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We are happy to announce that the 32nd recipient of The Creatives Grant is Ivilina Kouneva. Ivilina sent us a selection of her new paintings. Instead of throwing older, discarded works away, she was inserting them into her new paintings as cut out shapes. These jagged, twisted shapes that made colourful abstracts out of body, form, colour. Mythic shapes and fantasy spaces with mystery, magic and real actual energy. This ongoing fluid process where work could live on in new forms, constantly evolving and shifting. We found it so exciting, and we’re really glad to be able to support Ivilina’s practice in this way.
BIO: Ivilina Kouneva is a Bulgarian born visual who lives and works in the South East of England. Through colour, drawing and paper cut outs compositions she articulates her concerns about fragility of relationships in the current times. She moved to the UK from her home country over a decade ago, in her mature years. She studied painting and had been trained as an Art teacher.
Ivilina has gathered experience through different fields of life alongside maintaining a studio based practice. Between 2013 and 2014 she was a studio holder at Openhand Openspace (OHOS, Reading). Since the summer of 2019 she has been part of Artstudio 18, Bexhill-on-sea.
She has been reaching out for communities to belong and to contribute to. Her longing for love and togetherness overcoming distance and alienation reflects in her compositions with multilayered narratives. She is interested in how archetypal myths, stored in our collective memory, relate to our life today. Storytelling is vital for her work where often a resilient female braves her way through various adventures. She creates fresh stories employing her discarded work or abandoned creations of other artists. She sees the latter as collaborations through time and space.
In 2022 Ivilina took part in several art residencies – at Artscape Gibraltar Center of the Arts, Toronto Islands; Writers and Artists residency in Val David, Quebec and the Open Plan Studio at Towner gallery, Eastbourne. Her studies in Mindfulness brought her to further research in how the awareness in the present moment helps engaging with Imagination as a gateway to creativity. Most recently she received a bursary from a-n the Artists Information Company to explore artistic approaches where Art and Mindfulness meet.
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