(United Kingdom, 1982)

Anna Ilsley is based in the east of England in Suffolk. She graduated from Royal Drawing School in 2010 and University of Brighton’s BA in Fine Art Painting in 2006. Recent exhibitions include So Happy Together at Galleri Tom Christoffersen (2022), Crab Bisque at St Chad’s Projects (2022) and Lovers Lane at Oceans Apart (2021). She is Artist Associate at British School at Athens and has taken part in many Artist in Residence schemes, most recently at Newnham College, University of Cambridge for which she received an Arts Council Research and Development Award.

Over the past ten years, Anna Ilsley’s oil paintings, frescoes and drawings have been spaces in which she contemplates intimacy and sensuality in the face of archaic ideals of female chastity, sin and sexiness that still haunt contemporary culture. More recently her paintings celebrate motherhood and mothering, whilst responding to the inherent expectations and responsibilities drawn up from the murky depths of our mother and child image world.