Meet 2 new graduate artists: Katherine Benson and Tobias Francis

Meet 2 new Edinburgh graduates:

Katherine Benson (MA): My practice focuses on the representation of the female form and the relationship between women and the domestic sphere. My small-scale compositions offer a glimpse into everyday moments of domestic life and aims to highlight the emotionality of daily simple tasks. Within these settings, I provide a safe space for my female figures, in which they can exist without a hypercritical gaze. In this way, my work can be read overall as a love letter to women – the women I have grown up with, the women artists I have admired, and the female relationships that have been so important to me.

Tobias Francis (BA): My work relates the physical nature of walls to painterly concerns of representing flatness, perspective, and permanence, influenced by colour field paintings. Oil paintings and assemblage works, aim to convey a sense of suspense, depicting movements before something climatic; akin to "there (being) no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," as Hitchcock says. Performative notions of the fourth wall relate to the treatment of the illusory picture plane: paintings push a stage set aesthetic where the edges of each painting- like what happens behind walls- contain an anticipated form of action.

This stage set aesthetic in my paintings mainly refers to landscapes, seascapes, and theatrical settings. Clouds, smoke, shadow forms and darkness are repeating motifs that investigate the intangible within such settings, suggesting notions of trace and time.

- Tobias has recently been awarded an RSA John Kinross scholarship, which he will use as a research opportunity to broaden his interest in walls by retracing Florence's ancient fortifications.

Bluebird by Tobias Francis