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Petra Stenvall
Born 1986
Lives and works in London, UK
www.petrastenvall.com

Petra Stenvall is an artist and photographer. Growing up in the rural village of
Stensele, Sweden, Stenvall was always surrounded by arts and crafts. Whether
it was her Grandfather carving traditional knives and musical instruments, or
her Grandmother and Mother weaving and painting, the act of making was
something she took part in and experimented with from an early age.
If this love of “making” stems from a rural upbringing, it is her detachment from
it that has harboured a fascination with the imagery and texts of the Romantic
period. The paintings and verse of Romanticism display an attempt to escape
mass population and urban industrialism with a return to an overly exotic and
nostalgic view of nature. It is this creation of fantasy, maybe even a desire to
reconfi gure memory to transform a setting, that Stenvall feels relates to her
own practice.
In Search of Stillness, Stenvall is returning home to explore and document
women living in and around her hometown. Inspired by old paintings and
texts from the Romantic era, she takes fi ctional portraits of various women in
the landscape they inhabit. The pictures are large format photographs taken
on her 5x4 analogue fi lm camera. A small community doesn’t usually have the
same resources as big cities. She is interested in these women’s experiences and
the confl ict they might face by staying in smaller communities, and wants her
photographs to represent the isolation and loneliness but in the same time the
beauty of the still.
PETRA STENVALL graduated from London College of Communication, University of the Arts
London, with a BA (Hons) Photography, and has exhibited internationally as part of group
shows in Amsterdam, Arizona, London, Bulgaria and Stockholm. Her work has also been
featured in publications such as Aluma, Dazed & Confused, Kasino A4, and Juke Magazine. In
2012 she received the Metro Imaging Award and in 2013 she was listed as one of the fi nalists
for Fresh Faced +Wild Eyed, The Photographer Gallery, London.

Right: In Search of Stillness, 2013, Photography.
h: 100cm w: 70cm, Artist’s Collection.

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