Meet Tooney Phillips

Here at Art on a Postcard we are to delighted to have Tooney Phillips as one of our Artists for our Art on a Ukulele project. Tooney started out her career studying architecture at Manchester University and UCL. She then developed her work further by studying fine art at City and Guilds of London Art School (2008–10), where she was awarded the Norman Ackroyd Prize for Etching (2010). Norman is another one of the Artists working on our project! 

Pueblo Blanco

Her initial interest in architectural structure certainly influences her work, though as an artist Tooney felt she could explore a more complex perception of form and space in which a tension exists between solid and void. Main sources of her work are the medieval villages of France and Spain, and the limestone quarries of Provence, which are strongly geometric in character. Her elegant etchings and drawings often require as minimal, careful lines and shapes as possible to represent structure and division and to explore where perception meets the physical structures around us.

Puerto Blanco

In her series Pueblo Blanco, Tooney explores the 'White Towns' of Andalusia in Spain. All of the villages are characterised by whitewashed walls and red or brown tiled roofs. Using a range of mediums she explores the structure of the landscape. In the etchings, Tooney creates a sense of weighty meatiness, despite the tentative and fine lines in which they are engraved. She clearly has a strong sense of the skeletons of buildings, but builds upon them with a sensitive touch, examining how light falls upon them and what this does to our perception. Her work therefore creates a balance between being strong and being delicate, not bias to either. In that way it defies binary scales, being neither masculine nor feminine. As the grey she uses connotes, her work positions itself on a spectrum, providing a special insight into the world around us from someone who knows it as an architect but also feels it as an artist. 

We're so delighted to have Tooney Phillips on board as one of our Artists and can't wait to see what she does with one of our Ukes. Please join us to find out more and know how you can get involved by visiting our Phundee page here or by signing up to our mailing list (at the bottom of the page) to receive updates about this project and to find out about our crowdfunding campaign, the rewards we are offering and be part of the process over the next few months. 

About the writer

Rosa Torr has a BA in Politics and Philosophy from London currently at University College Dublin. Her place of interest is political theory and in particular Gender Studies. Rosa has written for numerous online publications and the University Observer. She is also a theatre maker and is currently co-artistic director of BUMP&GRIND Theatre Company. The show she co-wrote BUMP will be on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.