Rhona Hobson is a Chester-based artist whose practice brings together painting, drawing, image collecting and reflective enquiry. Alongside her developing visual arts practice, she brings around 20 years’ experience as an Educational Psychologist and Principal Educational Psychologist as well as previously working as a teacher and in operating theratres. This professional background informs her sustained interest in people, place, lived experience, connection and the subtle tensions that shape ordinary experience.

Her work is primarily in oil paint, a medium she is drawn to for its depth, slowness and capacity to hold traces of touch, atmosphere and time. However, material decisions are led by the image itself and the feeling it needs to carry. Drawing is fundamental to her practice as both a method of looking and a way of thinking: a space where ideas begin, fragments are tested and attention is sharpened.

Rhona works with found and old photographs, remembered interiors, glimpsed gestures, objects, shadows and visual details from daily life, forming an evolving archive. Her paintings explore connection and disconnection, pauses, thresholds, silences and the emotional charge of spaces between people and things. Through the AA2A programme, she is interested in extending this enquiry within a studio and educational context, using
time, dialogue and experimentation to develop a quieter, more attentive visual language. She also wants to explore the development and sustaining of the artist’s “why”: the motivations, questions and conditions that keep a creative practice alive over time.