Anne Adamson graduated from Trinity College, Dublin with a BA Hons in Art History, English and French before coming to Bristol to do a Post Graduate Certificate in Education. After living and teaching in Italy and Indonesia, she returned to Bristol where she studied for a PG Diploma in Fine Art which started her career as a professional artist.

During this period, she worked mainly on large scale portrait drawings, going on to win the Portrait Prize at the Brewhouse Open in 1988. Following a year at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Adamson spent the next decade working as a theatre director until, in 1999, she started a two year Fine Art MA at Wimbledon School of Art, London. In 2001 she won the drawing departmental prize and also First Prize in the Barclaycard Drawing Awards.

Since gaining her MA, Adamson has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and in 2010 she was Selector’s Choice of the Director of the Jerwood Institute at the Ludlow Open. Adamson has had two recent solo shows in Bristol: in 2010 at the RWA New Gallery and in 2011 at the Glass Room Gallery in the Colston Hall.

Adamson’s study of art history, her interest in oriental art, her observations during extensive travel in the Far and Middle East and a fascination with traces of the past have all informed her work. The images in her paintings explore the idea of what might remain when a place has been occupied and then abandoned, leaving a faint suggestion of habitation. Although these imagined spaces do not belong in any specific time or place, they reference actual landscapes and places and the memories associated with them.