Rebecca Dawson

Rebecca Dawson (b. 1997) is an artist from Straid, currently based in Belfast.

Dawson graduated from the Belfast School of Art in 2020, receiving a First Class Honours in Fine Art, specialising in painting. She then went on to become the painting Graduate in Residence for the BA Fine Art course at Belfast School of Art (2020-21).

Recent exhibitions include ‘Portrait of Northern Ireland: Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto’ at the Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast, 2021), ‘Emerging Artists 2021’ at Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre (Limavady, 2021) and ‘Ulster University BA and MFA Fine Art Graduate Show’ at the MAC (Belfast, 2020).

Dawson’s practice explores how we interact and use landscapes, and spaces that we inhabit – particularly with environments that are assumed to be ‘natural’, but rather are constructed and have an artificial quality to them. Her ideas are explored primarily through the use of paint, however the starting point for most of her work is from on site drawings within the landscape. Dawson wants to create an underlying artificiality in her work, be this through her choice in imagery, colour, composition, form or through the embedding of things into the surface of the paint. She seeks to explore this idea of a falseness to the landscape, alongside the questioning of what is ‘natural’? or what is perceived to be ‘natural’?