Kyra
Gibeily.

Kyra paints from the collision of two lives. She trained as a marine biologist and graduated into a job market that had no obvious place for either half of her, and "In the Headlights" was painted in exactly that gap: a self-portrait made during graduation season, eyes red, colours slightly wrong, edges rippling, the figure frozen the way a deer freezes when a car comes round the bend. She says one expression can tell the story of a whole life and situation, and her work bears that out, moving between oil painting and small ceramic and mixed-media sculptures that share the same unsettled, fully inhabited faces. Her current work turns the science back on the art, using published research to illustrate the relationship between people and the natural world. She photographs her paintings outdoors in grass, framed by buttercups, because the connection to nature is not a theme for her but the point.