About The Artist

I originally moved to Los Angeles to form a new band. The move into visual art came from drawing in the down-time on Hollywood film sets (Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Chrystal Skull) and then painting backdrops for my films. I made a short film (Palm Springs International ShortFest), then a feature film (https://vimeo.com/celiahemken) made entirely alone in my apartment challenging the received idea of film as only a collaborative medium. It took two years to make, writing, building, filming everything including playing the male characters and composing the music.

Painting from the imagination was an enormous leap. It was a revelation I wish for everyone. Painting and drawing feels unavailable to us as adults often, having left far behind the instinctive, open world of childhood. As I went deeper, I was reconnected to a primal relationship with accident and spontaneity in my non-representational art. It gave me insights into the Self and so into a creative, invisible Universe. An unforeseen bonus was to see inside my autistic sister's formerly incomprehensible world of non-verbal, abstract language. I then understood her repetitive motions, actions and speech were describing shapes in space so identifying the human language of the geometry and mathematics we have discovered in Nature. She was tuning herself to the energetic fields of Quantum Physics. I see an affinity with her when I arrange forms, shapes and colours that imply physical movement even when apparently static. I have synaesthesia so all senses are within the paintings.  

I like mirroring, the relationship of doubles becoming singles and repetitive but imperfect shapes. I make picture books with and without text. I love their physicality and the reveal of a narrative with each page turn. Each page relates to the other in sequence. They are pictorial stories, ruminations on the nature of reality and meditations.

I have returned to the U.K. and live in the West Country where there is a similar light to California.