About

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Dr Cerys Knighton is a 32-year-old artist based in Cardiff. Cerys's practice moves between oil painting, pointillism drawing, and sculpture. Her work is shaped by bipolarity.

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Cerys's work explores experiences of bipolar through a dream space. Self-portraits are set in a Wonderland-like place where, like Alice, her mood, energy, and body face changes that are extreme, anatomically unbalanced, and always puzzling. 

 

Cerys is influenced by the works of Sally Moore and their ability to both unsettle and amuse. Humour finds its way into the universal experience of moving between emotions, in the times we say, “Why was I so upset? I don’t know where my mind went!” with a tinge of embarrassment. The bipolar experience is to feel to to the extreme; to be manic, depressed, hypersensitive to sound, light, touch, to hallucinate, to believe in the unreal. Cerys wants humour to be a way in for people to connect to that experience as the human reality of feeling.

 

She ikes to juxtapose humour with discomfort. Influenced by the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo that split her identity through division and doubling, the core of Cerys's work is polarising emotion, identity, and perception. She swings between certainty and uncertainty in herself and her surroundings, between near-catatonic depression and the dizzying restlessness of mania, thrown into a different reality in her Bipolar Wonderland. Cerys's self-portraits are an unashamedly honest depiction of her own confusion, despondence, shame, and elation. 

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Cerys was awarded first prize at the Doctoral Academy’s Images of Research exhibition in 2021, and in 2019 was awarded the Disability Art Award from the Livery Company of Wales. Cerys has had four solo exhibitions and her work has been selected for numerous group exhibitions. Her work has been featured by media including Sky Arts, S4C, and BBC.​​