Dani Trew (b. 1991 in South Africa, raised in London) explores personal mythologies and notions of femininity through her drawings and paintings. Trew studied English Literature at the University of Oxford, and History of Design at the RCA, before starting a PhD on fashion and politics in late 19th century Britain. She also worked as an Assistant Curator in the V&A’s Furniture, Textile and Fashion Department, as a Curatorial Researcher for V&A East, and on a number of Fashion-related exhibitions. In 2015, she was shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award, and in 2023 she graduated from the Royal Drawing School’s postgraduate programme.
Influenced by her career as a design historian and curator, as well as her multicultural background, Trew’s drawings and paintings use disparate objects, textiles, and architectural features to examine tensions within internal worlds and narratives. Her work is characterised by exquisite detailing and the fusion of contemporary fashion with these art historical references, creating paintings which have both a sense of stillness and a psychological intensity.
You say your work explores ‘personal mythologies,’ is this an act of reframing or empowerment, or more an opportunity to blend interests in narrative & myth with memories & self-understanding?
I think the latter. I’m interested in internal narratives – how memories, emotions, and the stories we tell ourselves become entangled. My work tries to make sense of that entanglement and give it visual form, often drawing on myth, literature, and personal symbols as a way of structuring something that is otherwise quite elusive.
Dani Trew, But to you it was offal, 2025, Oil on board, 140x58cm
Can you talk us through your process? Do your pieces begin with a clear image, or do they emerge gradually through layering and revision?
My process unfolds along two parallel threads. One is external – gathering references from art history, fashion, architecture, film, colour and textural combinations I might stumble across in everyday life. The other is internal – trying to excavate memories and feelings and finding visual forms for them. At a certain point, the two converge: a composition or combination of textures suddenly feels in dialogue with that internal world. From there, I’ll work on that kernel, layering and adjusting through drawing and collaging, gradually refining the image through a process of adjustment and revision. By the time I begin the final piece, I have a fairly clear sense of the image I’m working toward. But the earlier stages of layering and exploration remain essential, they allow the work to emerge organically, rather than being imposed too rigidly from the outset.
Your work is known for its exquisite detailing, what role does detail play in storytelling for you?
Detail, for me, operates on multiple levels within storytelling. It begins as a means of translating internal states into visual form. Through close attention to texture and material, I’m interested in how detail can carry feeling, memory, or atmosphere – functioning as a kind of sensory language rather than explicit narrative.
Detail also allows me to create a dialogue between contrasting visual languages. Coming from a multicultural background, I’m drawn to bringing disparate influences into a single, cohesive frame. By rendering the textural differences between materials, I can hold these contrasts in tension while allowing them to coexist next to one another.
It also allows me to question the distinction between surface and depth. I’m interested in how meaning accumulates on the surface, how what might be dismissed as decorative or external can actually hold historical, political, and emotional weight. In that sense, detail becomes a way of locating meaning, not just beneath the image, but within it.
Dani Trew, Gewgaw, 2026, oil on board, 10 x 20 x 5.5 cm, £1800
Part of the AOAP Projects Summer Show Illuminated at the Royal Society of Arts, on view 10 - 23 June & via our online shop
Can you talk about the piece you’ve made for this show & how it responded to the theme ‘illuminated?’
The work takes the form of a devotional altarpiece and engages with Enlightenment ideas of illumination as clarity and rational truth. I was interested in destabilising that, thinking about illumination instead as something reflective, refractive, and potentially distorting. The central image – flowers seen through cellophane – resists transparency, while the surrounding safety-pin structure suggests a fragile, improvised system of holding meaning together. By centring ornament, surface, and feminised aesthetics, the work repositions what has historically been dismissed as decorative or irrational as a legitimate site of knowledge. Here, illumination is less about revealing a single truth, and more about entanglement – about how meaning can emerge through distortion, layering, and sensory experience.
You have an impressive academic background, from studying English Literature at Oxford to starting a PhD on Fashion and Politics, how have these periods of research & learning informed your artistic practice?
My academic background has definitely shaped both my process and the range of references I draw on. While I initially tried to separate my artistic practice from my research, I’ve come to see that they are driven by a shared impulse: to understand and elevate forms and subjects often dismissed as trivial – particularly fashion, material culture, and the embodied experiences of women and marginalised groups.
Studying Literature and the History of Design has also attuned me to form and style. I’m especially interested in how placing different visual languages in proximity can generate new readings. For example, what kinds of gendered, historical, or political meanings are activated when a rococo panel is set against a brutalist concrete column…
Dani Trew, Sequestered Battlefields, 2026, Oil on board, 140x80cm
You merge contemporary fashion with art historical references, what interests you about this dialogue between past and present?
I’m really drawn to questioning distinctions: between past and present, between ‘high’ art and more applied forms like fashion, and between surface – style, texture, clothing – and the deeper meanings they carry. Bringing these elements together allows those boundaries to become more fluid.
Fashion is particularly compelling because it operates simultaneously in the present while constantly referring to the past, and it’s immediate and embodied, but also shaped by historical codes of class, gender, and identity. When placed in dialogue with art historical forms, it activates a kind of temporal and cultural tension. I’m interested in what that tension reveals – how the present is constructed through multiple layered histories that remain active.
Do you have any projects on the horizon that you would like to share?
My next exhibition will be at Lyndsey Ingram this November.
Dani's work is featured as part of the AOAP Projects' Summer Show Illuminated at the Royal Society of Arts. The exhibition is on view from the 10th - 23rd June at the RSA and on our website.
Questions by Kate Reeve-Edwards
Banner image: Left - Artist Headshot | Right - Dani Trew, Beyond the Fragments, 2024, Oil on board, 50x50cm
