Poppy Faun is a Brighton-based multi-disciplinary artist whose practice fuses mid-century visual culture with contemporary feminist consciousness — taking the imagery of vintage magazines, advertising, and popular iconography and subjecting it to a process of collage, painting, and transformation that makes it simultaneously familiar and deeply strange.
Her visual language is rooted in what she calls retro-surrealism — the collision between the aesthetic conventions of the 1950s and 60s and a contemporary sensibility that refuses to accept those conventions at face value. The pin-up, the advertisement, the domestic scene: Faun takes these images and asks what they are really saying, what they cost the women who inhabited them, and what it means to find them beautiful. The result is work that operates on multiple levels simultaneously — visually seductive and conceptually charged, the pleasure and the critique arriving together.
Her titles carry the full weight of her practice: Good Girls Go To Heaven, Not Today Satan, Business As Usual, Love Wins (1969), Freedom Awaits, Stronger Everyday. Each one names something that her visual language then explores rather than illustrates — the gap between what is promised and what is delivered, between the image of freedom and its reality, between strength as aspiration and strength as daily practice.
Her work has been featured in British Vogue and has attracted the attention of brands including Playboy and Missoma. She has exhibited globally over the past decade. Her recent move into oil painting — the medium of the old masters she references and the tradition she is in conversation with — marks the beginning of what she describes as her most personal and ambitious body of work to date.
Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
