Pum Dunbar

Pum Dunbar is a Glasgow-based artist whose practice is driven by creative research, philosophy and psychoanalysis and realised through painting, collage and object making.

Pum Dunbar studied Philosophy at Glasgow University before embarking on training to become an Art Therapist and later completed a Masters in Research in Creative Practices at Glasgow School of Art in 2007. She uses painting and collage to explore and articulate the invisible processes related to the sense of the Self creating a diverse and immediate language of visual metaphors for our relationships with Self, Other and the World. Pum was artist in residence at Project Ability from August 2010-August 2011. As part of her residency, Pum invited six people with autistic spectrum condition to participate in a ten week research project examining creative practice in relation to a sense of self. The research was published as a book titled, Creative Praxis: Portraits & Dialogues from the sensory Inter/face of Autism. 

Pum Dunbar's practice is informed by psychoanalysis and a comprehensive understanding of psychotherapy. 

"I believe the art making process is the product of our human organic intelligence, it is therefor both emotional and imaginative and most essentially, it is communicative. Art presents us with encoded symbols, visual metaphors and forms of perceptual thinking that can evoke responses deep in the psyche. An image or object can simultaneously hold and communicate different meanings on various levels of consciousness offering a flexible and fluid interchange of ideas with the constant potential for movement of meanings and interpretation."