Bonnie and Clyde is a contemporary British artist, whose mixed media collage and print-work centres around scenes of the urban imaginary. Crossing medium and type, Bonnie and Clyde’s work takes the form of screen-prints, large-scale originals on paper and wood, as well as 3D installation pieces. Employing a blend of photography, collage and paint, the emotive art of Bonnie and Clyde explores the psychogeography of the metropolis, immersing the viewer in beautiful and bizarre cityscapes.
Steph Burnley (the creative spark behind Bonnie and Clyde) studied 3D design at Kingston University, before setting up her own graphic design business in Manchester, where she created posters, brochures, book sleeves, illustrations, T-shirts, signage, and festival campaigns. Large-scale clients included: Brighton Dome; Women’s Art International Festival (Cumbria); The Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester); Contact Theatre (Manchester); and Derbyshire Wildlife Trust. Burnley also worked in urban fashion and as a photographer for various music and culture magazines, before decamping to Brighton with her beloved Leica camera. It was here that her passion for photography and graphics fused in the art of screen-printing: a practice that became the cornerstone of her distinctive, collage aesthetic.
Amongst Bonnie and Clyde’s influences are Tracey Emin, Helen Levitt, Linda Sterling, Sir Peter Blake, Bill Viola, and Richard Hamilton, while the work of David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the New York ‘no wave’ scene, more broadly, have been central to the development of her aesthetic. Music and film, signage and iconography, bleed subtly into Bonnie and Clyde’s artwork, while architecture, street photography, and the coast appear as central, recurring tropes. With a sensitivity to the relationship between the built environment and the natural landscape, the work of Bonnie and Clyde opens out a space in which to explore human interaction in urban sites. Her work responds emotionally to the delicate association of the socio-political and the deeply personal, in a way that resonates with contemporary cultures of modernity.