Project Space: Lily Bunney

Drawing on found photography, early internet aesthetics, and tabloid culture, Bunney examines how images circulate, acquire new meanings and shape our collective understanding of people and events. Referencing figures such as Princess Diana and Monica Lewinsky, alongside the intimate and more anonymous imagery of early webcam culture, Bunney revisits moments embedded in the visual consciousness of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Her paintings consider the uneasy relationship between public fascination and private vulnerability, questioning who controls an image once it enters the public domain. Themes of voyeurism, celebrity and desire emerge through compositions that oscillate between sincerity and irony, often incorporating the playful, and now nostalgia-laden, visual language of early online culture. Central to Bunney’s practice is a distinctive hand-painted ‘pointillist’ technique. Recalling both digital pixels and the halftone printing of newspapers, her meticulous process transforms fleeting, mass-circulated images into tactile paintings that demand sustained attention. Using Photoshop to crop into an image, then alter its colours and separate it into points of colour, Bunney heightens the tension between the immediacy of digital consumption, the strength of emotional reactions to an image, and the analytical and laborious process she has devised. Through these reimagined images, Bunney explores how cultural narratives are constructed, distorted and preserved. By giving permanence to material originally intended for rapid consumption, she invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between looking and being looked at, and the ways images continue to shape our understanding of the past.