Penelope Blunsden (b. 2001) is an emerging artist living and working in Sydney, Australia. Her current practice spans painting and drawing, with an interest in collective memory, personal and unofficial histories, and the sublime feeling of familiarity in an unknown landscape. Painting from personal and family archives, her work explores collective experiences of déjà vu and nostalgia while recalling the felt atmosphere of ambiguous yet specific landscapes. Blunsden utilises square and vertical formats, cutting off the edges of the painting while alluding to her source material of film slides and digital photography. In doing so, her paintings capture a reflective idea of memory. That is, the emotional distance between a real landscape, a photograph, and a memory – between experience and longing. Her small scale works intimately depict ambiguous places removed of recognisable figures. These distant places seem almost escapist - an act of yearning for a memory that is both anywhere and nowhere.
Penelope Blunsden graduated from the National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2021. Blunsden has been involved in several group shows: most notably the National Art School’s BFA Graduate Exhibition (2022), as a finalist in the Clyde and Co Art Award (2022), the Fifty Squared Art Prize at Brunswick Street Gallery (2023), This Must be the Place at 25B Gallery Darlinghurst (2024) and the Manly Art Gallery and Museum Express Yourself Exhibition (2019) where she won the MAG&M Society Youth Art Award. In 2024 Blunsden was awarded a spot in Studio Kura’s artist in residence program, where she lived and worked in rural Itoshima, Japan, culminating in a group show with her body of work titled ‘Familiar Skies, Unfamiliar Lands’. Blunsden has also been awarded the 2024/25 Arts & Creativity Grant presented by the Northern Beaches Council and will have her debut solo exhibition in 2025.