Lou Winwood is a visual artist working in mixed media. Following an extensive career as a fashion editor, stylist and designer, she graduated with BA in Fine Art Mixed Media (First Class Hons.) at the University of Westminster in 2023. Based in Hertfordshire, Lou's work draws from what she terms "corrupt nostalgia". Using discarded materials and working from old photographs and printed ephemera, Lou mixes painting and collage to produce work saturated with colour and pattern. 

 

Lou has fostered a unique aesthetic used to combine dislocated images, textures and materials. Themes of memory, family, nostalgia and pets are funnelled into a kind of gimcrack dystopia. Lou is compelled to blur decades, mix messages and make use of discarded matter by the speed of cultural turnover and the resultant waste produced by today’s throwaway society. Materials ranging from paint, cut up second-hand books, dated wallpaper and textile scraps archived over a lifetime of scouring jumble sales, car boots, charity shops and people’s attics, inspire paintings and mixed media drawings applied to pre-used canvasses. Dated ornaments, altered diagrams, decaying foliage and incidental figures combine to create work that is simultaneously playful and unsettling. 

 

Lou’s work draws on concepts of interference and disorder, deliberately probing accepted boundaries, perception, protocol and comprehension to provoke a reassessing of meaning. Combining random imagery into deliberately unfathomable compositions, she comments on the bombardment of information imposed by modern-day media and the human struggle to make sense of it. She explains, 

​

“There’s a phenomenon called apophenia, a tendency for the brain to seek meaningful connections between random, unrelated information even when none exists. I like the unease created in the brain when things don’t add up. You can’t quite figure out what’s going on because the narrative in the work is deliberately distorted, the images out of context and the composition slightly off-kilter or floating in the canvas.”