Iris McConnell

Happy New Year

Mixed media on paper

59 x 41 cm

About:

Iris McConnell is a third-year Fine Art student at City and Guilds of London Art School, soon to graduate in June 2024. She grew up in Finchley, North London, and now resides in Hackney. Before starting her undergraduate course, she attended The Essential School of Painting for a year-long weekly painting course, for which she was accepted through the ESOP Young Artists Scholarship program.

Iris’ practice is centred around themes of consumer desire, overindulgence, and competition, pushing mediums and imagery to perverse extremes. She focuses on ‘unattainable’ pleasures, the promise of success and a luxurious lifestyle, and the societal control that unconsciously underlines this.

My work uses typically 'low' art materials to capture states of manic overindulgence, pushing mediums and imagery to perverse extremes, and amalgamating imagery that is both saccharine and grotesque. I use satirical commentary to explore ideas of excess and desensitization, hierarchies of value, and power imbalances. 

Believing that caricature can get you closer to truth than an imitation of reality, this language has now become essential to my practice. My work, which spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, is intended as a sensory reality that extends across the imagined, real, and symbolic.