“This painting marks a moment where I became increasingly interested in how the image of a figure might relate to its environment and vice versa – the two becoming one. The subject itself encourages a certain merging: the figure of a girl bathed in strips of light from a venetian blind,” Unwin says of Untitled. “I had in mind how when strong light cuts through a room it can appear almost as if it divides anything in front of it. Here I was particularly interested in how the coming together of person and place could be explored through the materials themselves. I like the idea of a feeling being translated quite physically. I have used quite opaque paints for the light – acrylic and oil – whereas for the majority of the figure I have used powdered graphite – making some soft and translucent marks. I was thinking about the structure of the blind being very solid and still, the light being so strong it has almost become ‘stuff’ and the figure being relatively transient and delicately, gently moving.”