My name is Rowan Dunn (he/they), and I’m a final-year Art student from Brighton. My work explores queerness, otherness, and community through characters, storytelling, and print. 

I work across digital and physical formats, and over the past year I’ve developed a digital drawing style that mimics traditional media such as gouache, oil paints, pencil and risograph print. I like work that feels tactile and handmade, even when it’s digital. I spend every free moment I have drawing, and so finding different ways of working to create different outcomes is essential to the breadth of work I make. 

I find myself infinitely coming back to cryptids, monsters, and creatures that don’t quite fit – and how we use them to talk about fear, identity, and difference. I take inspiration from the artists of my childhood, like Hayao Miyazaki, Tove Jansson and Brian Froud – storytellers who build strange, layered worlds filled with tenderness and contradiction. They provided me a home within their work and taught me how to contextualise the sense of otherness that follows me, and I can only hope to continue that through my own practice. 

My final project, The Unreality Archive, is a collection of zines, flyers, fake documents and cryptid field reports from a fictional research world. It’s part mythology, part media criticism, and part reflection on what it means to be seen as a puzzle, a problem, or a story.