Artist Statement
My paintings interrogate the contemporary experience of the female body as felt, perceived and performing - multiple and uncontainable. Sometimes this is expressed through comparison with animals and plants in diptych format; sometimes the paint and physicality of the work itself carry that sense of tension.
Painting, for me, is gestational: an act of nurture, collaboration and endurance that questions how the generative female body is valued and regarded in contemporary society.
I paint on silk, faux suede, cotton velvet and aluminium - materials associated with clothing, abundance and the erotic - to entice the mammalian desire for softness and the human admiration for luxury.
My subject matter is a revisiting of my own lush, unbounded experiences, often linked to water, presented as spectacle. Like the body, my paintings are made primarily with water. Pigments bleed, penetrate and spread, pulled by the fabric itself.
Bright and inviting from a distance, on closer inspection the works reveal unusual materials and unexpected pairings, often overwhelming in saturation and strategic in scale. The largest paintings become billboards that must be viewed from afar; the smallest act like pixels, requiring intimate closeness.
At once softly reassuring, destabilising and playfully enigmatic, the works aim to embrace the vitality that comes from friction and desire.
Biography
British-American painter Rose Fulbright (b.1988) works with various media on surfaces with rich cultural and sensorial associations. She grew up between Portmeirion and Polynesian statues, the grandchild of architects, potters, science fiction writers and a beauty queen, the child of an anthropologist and a marine biologist.
Her practice is shaped by an ongoing inquiry into contemporary female identity - both how it is formed and how it is performed - articulated through themes of the regarded body, sensory experience, fulfilment, desire, and power.
Having first studied couture fashion at Parsons, Paris, Fulbright went on to complete a BA in Costume Design at London College of Fashion. In the early years of her career, Fulbright’s practice focussed on design in her eponymous clothing label, crafting silk loungewear pieces as ‘wearable art’ intended to heighten the wearer’s awareness of their body’s preciousness and presence. This approach resonated strongly with collectors - some of whom even chose to wear their silk robes during the early stages of childbirth.
Rose has lived and worked in Paris, Beijing, and Brussels, and is now based in London with her husband and two children. She will graduate from an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School in September 2026. She has exhibited in Belgium and the UK since 2023, and her work is in private collections in the UK, Europe, USA, Mexico and Asia.
CV
Selected Exhibitions
2026, Group Show, Traction, Exeter
2026, Group Show, 36 Hours, Lewisham Arthouse, London
2026, Group Show, The OAC, Handbag Factory, London
2026, Group Show, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Oriel Brondanw, Wales
2026, Group Show, Women’s Day, Outhouse Gallery, London
2025, Solo Show, The Staircase, Painter’s Hall, London
2025, Group Show, JOY, Glenside Hospital Museum, Bristol
2025, Group Show, Transmission, Millbank Tower, London
2025, Group Show, Transmission, Stackt, Toronto
2025, Group Show, The Dome, Portmeirion, UK
2023, Solo Show, The Fauvist Jungle, The Hari Hotel, London
2023, Solo Show, The Fauvist Jungle, The Nine, Brussels
Residencies
2024- 2025, Transmission Residency in association with CGLAS and UAL, London and OCADU, Toronto
2023, Portmeirion Village Artist in Residence
2023, Tresco Island Residency