Pen Dalton

Born in 1944, London artist Pen Dalton attended Goldsmiths Art School in the 1960s where she absorbed the then avant garde practices of American Modernist painting. The formal part of her education was completed in 2008 with a PhD employing Wittgenstein's Family Resemblance theory as analogy for art. Throughout her life Pen has been fascinated with contemporary issues of artistic production: from radical photography/printing in the 1970s; through psychoanalytic and linguistic image text work in the 1980s to installation and conceptual practice in the late '80s and '90s. Pen has disseminated her thoughts and findings through research, lectures, publishing and exhibiting. In recent years she eschewed an academic approach and, with intuition and a wealth of skill and experience, made a subjective turn in relation to new concepts of expressive painting. The question she constantly returns to is: 'How do we as humans cognitively manage and create a coherent sense of self from the mass of different information to which our bodies and minds are subject?'