Gallery of Works
A collection of different work, listed by media.
Gallery of Works
Rosie sold her first paintings when she was about 15 year old, she has been making and selling for over 3 decades. She trained as an Archaeological site and find illustrator, then went on to qualify as a secondary Art and Design teacher in the late 1990s. Rosie exhibits widely, both nationally and internationally. Recently returning to the pen and ink drawing, from her archaeological training developing a series of educational children’s books – Small Creatures: Jenny Wren will, hopefully be in print soon.
Rosie Burns Artist
Sea, Skies and moments
Rosie particularly enjoys “the places where the land meets the sea and the light dances between surfaces”. A large oil on canvas was features in Coast Magazine, May 2023, as part of editorial on Art Makers UK – a North devon collective Rosie is actively involved with. Like many artists and makers, Rosie finds great inspiration in chance moments, such as a reflection in a shop window where the complex play on perceived picture planes offers an illusionary encounter. Like many makers, the small encounters with a scene or scenario can affect the work Rosie produces. The artist suspended in the window – the shop front, inside the shop and the street reflected behind. A complex play on different perceived picture planes. – An illusion of reflection and a personal encounter, Rosie often revisits shop window reflection painting – collected stories from a momentary experience.
As well as recording in oil and watercolour the expanse of the sea and sky, Rosie collects bits and stuff – spiralling forms are the basis of the work she has developed, generating a narrative: stories of people and places.
Rosie Burns Artist
Marigold Men and Sirens – challenging depictions of gender
Rosie’s Marigold Men and Sirens series challenge and subvert conventional depictions of gender in popular culture, advertising and art history. The concern is socio-political, an address of assumed gender roles in Art and physical history. Marigold Men (Marigolds are luridly coloured rubber gloves) an ongoing series of prints: the male nude wearing rubber gloves, comic and concerned with the depiction of men in advertising using cleaning products: Mr. Clean, Mr. Muscle, Mr. Sheen etc. Some take poses from art history, others just put the male nude in a domestic role: poses adapted from Art history – Rodin’s fallen in the gates of hell is given new context in the domestic.
Rosie wants to depict women as thinkers, strong, singular entities not mother or queen or sex object, able to indulge and be guilty of sloth, envy, lust or power and still maintain feminine beauty – sirens. Some titles connect to powerful women in history, feminist icons and femme fatales. Experiencing depictions of women in Degas delicate dancers and burlesque bathers, Rodin’s fallen in the gates of hell and sexualised drawings of women: Gustaf Klimt, Egon Sheila and Eric Gill; Henry Moore’s gigantic queens and powerful mothers cradling infants reinforce the same depictions investigated in Archaeology, something to challenge and address. Rosie’s prints and ceramic sculpture allude to the depiction of form through line: also influenced by the women in Picasso’s blue period drawings and reductionist line drawings by Matisse.
Rosie Burns Artist
Original prints Eco Prints - spiralling, C-19 Health over Wealth
This are prints from an ongoing series, each with an animal in-front of a spiralling motif, they represent Rosie’s muse into the effect we are having on our planet. There is time to change behaviours – consumption and pollution and ways of interacting with our environment, and each other, trickle down capitalist systems needs challenging and changing. Rosie is inspired in her life choices through a love of the natural world, and ongoing observation. The prints have a spiralling background – slightly frightening – calling for action and change, to reconsider consumption to develop an environmental and social justice for future generations, before it is environmentally too late. Recently, Rosie made visual connections with the spiral motif and doughnut economic models – she made the first of these prints in 2016, an economic model founded in principals of social justice over capital
The toilet roll C-19 print series form Rosie’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, forming a visual representation of the effect of the virus on the population of England, and Rosie, from March 2020. The linguistic and visual ‘aids’ of the pandemic generated this series of prints: ‘seeing myself as a strange amorphous stick person – an economic unit rather than an individual – with huge concern about putting health over wealth’. The C-19 Health over Wealth series depicts Rosie’s deceptively light-hearted take on this global crisis, a response which belies a more serious personal and social conviction that the overconsumption of our planet’s resources is not without cost. Eco Prints are an ongoing series of woodcut prints, developed in response to environmental concerns, over consumption is and pollution have become a muse.
