Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas
Rikki is a Cambridge-based artist whose paintings explore the sense of time and place. She works mainly in acrylics and mixed media/collage, creating visually textured paintings that draw expressively on colour, line, and composition to convey mood and drama. She is particularly drawn to the haunting atmosphere of places marked by the passage of time and change in both urban and natural environments – peeling layers of paintwork, the crumbling walls of old buildings and the echoes of ancient backstreets, or the scarred constancy of wild and isolated places.
Her interest is in how these marks nuance the mood and atmosphere of the place and moment as we experience it - traces of past lives, stories and associations we merely glimpse or sense. The physical process of layering and mark-making is an important means of exploring and understanding her own response to these places and embedding this into the texture of the artwork. She sometimes incorporates fragments of found or hand-painted collage or text, or uses other materials gathered from these places in the moment, sealing a tangible connection to the subject within the fabric of finished piece.
Rikki's academic background in Hispanic film and cultural studies, and time spent living and travelling in Spain and Latin America, are a rich source of inspiration for much of her work (e.g. her 'Callejeando' and 'Recordando México' series), as is her fascination with the history and associations of other places holding a particular meaning for her, such as the inscrutable landscapes of the Cambridgeshire fenlands or the contrastingly rugged mountains of Cumbria and Northern Spain (e.g.her 'Ebb and Flow' and 'Ancares' series). Her paintings seek to express something of the enigmatic qualities these places present for her.
Rikki's work has been exhibited in several Cambridgeshire galleries, including Babylon Gallery in Ely, Fen Ditton Gallery, AKA and Galeria Moderna in Cambridge. She is a member of Cambridge Drawing Society, in the CDS Spring and Summer exhibitions in Cambridge. She also participates regularly in Cambridge Open Studios.