About
Sian Atkins is a UK-based artist, born in 1988, who exhibited an early passion for art and observing the world around her. She studied geography and politics to Masters level before dedicating herself full-time to her artistic pursuits. Her studies profoundly shaped her worldview and now greatly inform her painterly works as she seeks to convey pressing social justice and activist messages through her chosen mediums.
Sian’s work is informed by abstract expressionism and neo-expressionism, the art brut movement, and graffiti aesthetic. She has a fascination with colour, exploring bold contrasts, vivid hues including neon, and unusual combinations. For Sian, painting is a deeply embodied sensory experience, as she makes use of a wide range of tools and materials including more unconventional ones. The paintings are deeply layered and exhibit diverse expressive mark makings from thick textured lines to flat swathes of colour, from texts and small doodles to scribbles, scratches and drips. Her works seek to blend heaviness with playfulness, criticism with optimism, all within a raw, spontaneous and joyful practice.
Being late-diagnosed autistic, as well as queer and vegan, offers her an outsider standpoint and fresh perspectives that inform her artwork in unique ways. However, Sian is sensitive to discourses around identity politics, and especially interested in how the struggles of marginalised groups can better merge with the population at large with the aim of forming a broader coalitional politics that works across difference towards radical transformative justice for all.
As a result, her work touches on personal themes such as disability justice and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as looking more widely to anti-racism, anti-colonialism and climate justice, whilst ideas around anti- and post-capitalism, tie all this together. Sian believes art is a valuable tool for furthering progressive causes, and seeks to use it both to highlight harmful norms and practices, as well as to help us imagine better, even utopic, future possibilities. Her work will speak to all those who desire beauty, liberation, and the prospect of a more compassionate and equitable world for generations to come.
Exhibitions:
2025, Arcadia, MADE Gallery, Cardiff, UK
Publications:
2025, ''Balance & Beauty'', REROUTE Art Magazine
