234. Cecilia Reeve - Like a Moth

2026
Oil on Canvas
17.78 x 17.78 cm
Signed on Verso

Cecilia Reeve is an artist working across animation and painting. She creates oneiric narratives that explore longing, contemplation, and human connection through cinematic scenes that hover between the compelling and the unsettling. Using careful composition, movement, and colour, her work evokes emotional and psychological states that unfold through atmosphere rather than direct explanation.

Influenced by Magical Realism and theories of the unconscious, Reeve’s work reflects a desire for connection in an era increasingly shaped by isolation and disconnection. Her paintings and animations operate according to their own internal logic, drawing viewers into suspended, dreamlike spaces where meaning emerges through recurring symbols and allegorical fragments. Hands, shadows, bodies distorted through water or fabric, and moments of contact between figures, animals, and nature recur throughout the work, charged with intimacy, ambiguity, and tension.

Narrative plays a central role in her practice. Her paintings explore how stories can exist within a single image, while her animations extend this language over time through layered sequences of moving images. Layering also forms a material thread across both practices: animations are built through compositing different materials and techniques, while her cinematic oil paintings emerge through thin layers of paint. Whether through slow-moving animation or the stillness of a painted scene, movement and interruption remain central, suggesting something unfolding just beyond the frame.

Reeve completed a BA in Illustration at the University of Brighton (2014–2018), before undertaking an MA in Animation at the Royal College of Art, London (2021–2023).

Recent exhibitions include What the Water Gave Them at Twilight Contemporary, London (solo, 2025) and Sleepwalking at Soho Revue, London (solo, 2025).

Awards and distinctions include the ArtsThread Global Graduation Award in collaboration with Gucci for Film/Animation (2023), and a Vimeo Staff Pick for Porous (2025).