Xanthe Burdett (born 1995, Devon) is a figurative oil painter currently studying for an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.

Artists Statement:

A place where time wavers and figures shift in and out of focus, where the black dog hunts and Daphne flees Apollo.

The work I make is embedded in the woodlands that fringe Dartmoor in South Devon. The forests there are a space to disappear, a tapestry of old growth and new – where temperate rain forests, peaty rivers and classical mythologies and folk tales are stitched together. A place where the boundaries between the real and the mythical blur.

Layering, scrubbing away and glazing transparent paint creates overlapping and enmeshed strata of earth, tree, body and light. Sometimes my paintings move beneath the earth – looking at the ground as a repository of human bodies and artefacts, of fungal life and non-human communications.

Escaping the confines of the rational and known, figures slip into the weird, surreal and uncanny.