Sydna Younson studied Fine Art (Painting) in London at Central St Martins School of Art and Design, graduating in 1990. She was artist in residence at St John-at-Hackney from 1991-1995.
Since then she has continued her studio practice in London, exhibiting widely in the UK. Solo shows include at Fordham, Paul Smith and Lyndon's Fine Art. Group shows include various with Beverley Knowles Fine Art (incl London Art Fair - Islington, Art London - Chelsea, Chase - Royal College of Art), Discerning Eye - Mall Galleries, Platform 100 - ING Bank, Natural Response - Sun and Doves, Picture This - Hat on Wall, Love'n'Bullets - Transition Gallery, various with Fordham, Walton Contemporary Art, Quantum Contemporary Art and Mary Somerville Art Trust.
Commissioned work includes Topshop - Oxford Circus, Topshop and Topman - Arnedale Centre and private collections in Europe and worldwide.
Extreme landscapes and uncontrollable environments provide the sense of absence and unease that characterize Sydna Younson's painting. The work is painted with exaggerated lushness, so that even unsettling or unsafe environments suggest a seductive yet unbelievable quality. They deliberately question the deceptively familiar safety of a pastoral idyll by depicting freak events. Apocalyptic scenes of nature run wild are painted in an illustrative narrative style. This is influenced by the way memory distorts visual experiences. Growing up in London gave wild landscapes the particular nostalgia of both great adventure and extraordinary unpredictability, represented as symbols of states of mind and of unreliable memories.
She often uses filmic imagery, either literally or fabricated from sequential photography, manipulated to suggest the freeze-frame quality of slowed down action. Film techniques of framing a view with clues of the narrative almost out of shot are exaggerated, and often the canvases are specifically formatted to mimic wide-screen panoramic ratios.
The landscapes are often artificial representations, for example the computer generated images of tornados from a film rather than the more unbelievable news footage of actual tornados. When they are taken from constructed sequential photographs they are of seemingly unreal or at least unbelievable journeys, like driving through forest fires in Australia. Directly influenced by Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, Edward Hopper's figures and numerous films the work plays with blurring the line between real/unreal and natural/staged. The images are chosen to correspond to very personal journeys, using landscape to evoke and mimic emotional states of love, loss and uncertainty.
The wilderness depicted is never left unspoilt - there is always evidence of how the viewer is passing through it, often by suggestions of the road beneath the scene. The road is seen curving round corners ahead so what is presented is the journey rather than the destination. There is a sense of passing through incredible experiences, glimpsed almost peripherally, yet slowed to still images so the viewer can affect the speed of travel by the act of looking.