If awarded the Dover Prize bursary, I will use the funding to support the production of a new body of work titled Nocturne Channel—a continuation of my investigation into contemporary nightlife, femininity, and painting as a record of social environments. This bursary would be instrumental in both the research and execution phases of the project, enabling me to scale up my work materially, technically, and conceptually.
A significant portion of the award will be used to cover the costs of large-scale canvases, oil paints, mediums, and other studio materials essential to my process. I plan to produce a suite of works that vary in scale—from intimate portraits to immersive, large-format scenes that reflect the expansive and immersive nature of club environments. The bursary will allow me to maintain the ambitious materiality of my painting practice without compromise.
Crucially, this funding will also support fieldwork and travel across the North East and Paris. I intend to visit independent nightlife venues, attend electronic music events, and gather documentation through photography and drawing. These visual notes will become the fragmented, atmospheric references that underpin my figurative compositions. I will also visit museums and archives in Paris to study the works of Degas, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec—artists whose portrayals of nightlife and femininity resonate strongly with my own concerns.
In addition to studio production and research, I will use the bursary to engage local collaborators—potentially sound artists or performers—to explore how live events might feed into the rhythm and texture of my visual work. These collaborations will inform both content and form, and may lead to a multi-sensory exhibition outcome.
This award represents a rare opportunity to consolidate and expand a critical phase of my practice. It will allow me to move beyond isolated studio work, embedding myself in new environments, engaging with regional creative communities, and pushing both the material and intellectual depth of my painting. Through this, I hope to produce a body of work that captures the psychological charge and cultural weight of contemporary nightlife as both a social archive and a visual language.
My work offers a distinctive lens through which to explore contemporary life—focusing on transitional environments such as nightclubs, bars, and liminal urban spaces, and reimagining them through a painterly language rooted in Impressionism and psychological portraiture. By embedding this practice within Darlington and the wider North East, I hope to spotlight the region’s vibrant but often under-recognised creative and subcultural scenes.
Through site-specific research and engagement with local venues, performers, and musicians, I aim to create work that reflects the cultural pulse of the area, bridging the historical with the contemporary. In doing so, I hope to contribute to a broader visual archive of Northern identity—one that is emotionally complex, dynamic, and rooted in lived experience.
By exhibiting the resulting work locally and opening my process to the community—through open studio events, talks, or collaborations—I intend to make contemporary painting accessible to wider audiences. The project will not only bring visibility to the creative communities already active in Darlington, but also signal the town as a place where ambitious, research-led contemporary practice can thrive. This visibility can attract attention from national audiences, contributing to the ongoing redefinition of the North East as a site of cultural innovation.
My paintings embody a contemporary revision of Impressionism, turning to the movement’s obsession with light and the female subject, whilst presenting a perverse, post-industrial luminosity: neon and acid, synthetic and sublime. A departure from romantic boudoirs or Degasian ballet studios, my settings are decimated interiors and liminal urban peripheries. They are techno nightclubs, gothic facades, post-climate crisis gardens, dreamlike rooms of quiet surveillance. Within these scapes, women confront and evade the gaze in equal measure—framed not as muses but as complex avatars of autonomy and unrest. Often confronting the viewer with theatrical poise, only to dissolve into expressive gesture or visual noise, their gazes glitch between confrontation and withdrawal. These women do not ask to be interpreted. They exist in moments of disjunction: reclining yet uneasy, luminous yet fragmented. These works are psychological dioramas. Existing outside traditional portraiture, these psychological projections resist legibility, yet echo the inscrutable poise of Tudor women—composed like icons, their gazes lacquered in secrecy. Exploring the tension between subject and setting, desire and estrangement, faces might surface in mirrors, or merge with botanical apparitions. Recurring motifs such as screens, reflective pools and lavish drapery—act as portals rather than props. They heighten the sense that these scenes are suspended somewhere between the private and the performative, the sacred and the synthetic. The canvas is void of time specificity, with outdated modes of technology such as old TVs and nostalgic test screens, abstracting and blurring the line between concrete figure and surrounding.
Recent exhibitions include Here, Elsewhere at Naranjo 141 (Mexico City), Nocturnalia (solo) at Fredericks & Freiser, and Fever Dream with Victoria Miro and Vortic.
I studied Fine Art at Bath School of Art & Design. Prior to this I completed my Art Foundation at Kingston University.
Cultured Magazine in 2023 & 2022
Juxtapoz Magazine in 2023 &2024
Art She Says Interview in 2022
Since 2021 I am represented by Fredericks & Freiser Gallery in New York City
Naranjo 141 Residency Mexico City 2024
Zuecca Projects Residency, Venice 2022
Cob X Plop Residency London 2021
Email: kenneallyanna@gmail.com
Address: 19 Defoe Avenue, Kew, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 4DL, GB
Local Authority: London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.
