About Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde, also known as Steph Burnley, is a contemporary British artist based in Brighton, UK. Her work in primarily mixed media collage exploring scenes of the urban imaginary incorporating painting and print techniques. Bonnie and Clyde's art immerses the viewer in beautiful and bizarre cityscapes through a combination of photography, collage, texture and paint, depicting the psychogeography of the metropolis.

Burnley studied 3D design at Kingston University before setting up her own graphic design business in Manchester, where she created a wide range of designs, including posters, brochures, book sleeves, illustrations, logos, websites, signage, and festival campaigns. She later worked in urban fashion and as a photographer for various music and culture magazines before moving to Brighton and focusing on screen-printing, which became the cornerstone of her distinctive, collage aesthetic.

In the development of her aesthetic, music and film, signage, iconography, architecture, street photography, and the coast appear as central, recurring tropes in Bonnie and Clyde's artwork. With a sensitivity to the relationship between the built environment and the natural landscape, Bonnie and Clyde's work offers a space to explore human interaction in urban sites, with a focus on the delicate association of the socio-political and the deeply personal.

Bonnie and Clyde's imagined scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of locations, with the iconic topography of California, from the vibrant architecture of Santa Monica to rows of palm trees at Venice Beach, featuring heavily in her work. Burnley's jet-setter spirit is reflected in the host of other urban centres, including Tokyo, London, Rome and Havana, that have also appeared across her oeuvre. Her passion for twentieth-century architecture, from modernism to brutalism, to post-modernism and beyond, suffuses the overall aesthetic.

Bonnie and Clyde is now focused on painting on canvas and wood panels, which are created through a combination of digital and tactile processes. She uses her photographs, along with painted areas , 3D elements, and printed matter, to represent the beautiful, messy, vibrant, and chaotic nature of life in the city. Her abstracted pieces tell a dizzying, non-linear narrative of the individual, navigating the dualistic city, which is always banal as well as beautiful, terrifying while magnetic.