User:Ilonapeel

Ilona Peel
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Biography
As a Canadian sculptor, Ilona’s artistic goal is to evoke curiosity and a response from the viewer while exploring ideas of gender and psychological elements of personality, emotion and self-identification. Her pieces embody her unusual, expressive and hyper surrealistic style and she is always seeking to make a statement regarding social challenges. She creates art based on unusual subject matter and created her first large scale sculpture at the age of sixteen, however her most provocative sculpture was of a child-size ceramic female figure with an abstracted body and a ‘golden egg’ finish. The sculpture titled, “Upheaval”, won her first public achievement, The Young Honours Artist Award, at the Wellington Art Gallery in Aurora, Ontario (2006). While still an Honours student at York University in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, her craft continues to mature as her creative and constructive skills continue to be refined. True to form, Ilona is currently creating a large scale creature that crosses the attributes of an exotic Tarsier monkey and an alien/gargoyle hybrid and will be featured in upcoming shows at York University and a downtown Frat house class exhibition. When asked recently about her artistic future, Ilona replied, “From my perspective, the possibilities are endless and so are the opportunities to discover myself as an artist.”

Artist Statement
My artwork challenges social issues concerning gender, sexuality and representational meaning. In my work, I investigate conflicting dualities to reveal their limitations and contradictions; dualities such as the real vs. the surreal, certainty vs. uncertainty, and normality vs. abnormality. Through the exploration of the mind, personality, identity, character, and behaviour; my artwork is designed to invoke psychological ideas that provoke uncomfortable feelings in the viewer. The concepts are derived from childhood stories and myths that implant fears and curiosities that continue on to be part of adult culture. The artwork is a hyper-real representation of the natural and artificial. The artwork references human and animal hybrids through the investigation of various materials, in attempt to achieve a pseudo real representation that questions and reconstructs notions of the social issues of ethics. In the creation and process of these sculptures, materials such as synthetic feathers, hair, glass eyes, casted teeth and fingernails help to achieve the realistic and illusionistic depiction of the image. These sculptures create alternative perceptions of the self in relation to the human body and the body of an animal, resulting in endless possibilities of a hybrid. The term hybrid suggests reconstruction of the unusual, into imagery that gives clues to the context and interpretations of the mind.

Ilona Peel

Resume
Contact by email: ilonapeel@gmail.com

Ilona Peel