Born in a crossfire hurricane in Chicago, Illinois, Pamela studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her cross-cultural work has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and America.
Pamela has lived and worked in the UK since 1989. After completing her BFA at Northern Illinois University in 1981, she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completing an MFA in Painting alongside the Art History Certificate Program in 1984. In 2014 she gained a Certificate of Botanical Art from the English Gardening School. Golden’s extensive world-wide exhibitions include a solo show at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, in 2004.
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Practice
Growing up in Chicago, Pamela was deeply influenced by the wealth of stimuli of the city. There she completed her MFA in Painting alongside film history at the School of the Art Institute when the school was still physically part of the museum. With a world increasingly reliant on the possibilities of digital manipulation, the most ethical solution she has been able to achieve has been to revisit and rework photography through painting. The transformation is about time and engagement with the image.
Pamela's practice involves reimagining absent or potential histories suggested by the source materials, exploring generational relationships with imagery and visual culture, and considering how associations adapt and alter over time.
She reimagines found photographs and illustrations to embody an interrelation between past and present, filling in gaps to generate a strong sense of narrative. This most often takes form in paintings but stretches to films, drawings and music albums. The technical method is a type of mash up holding true to each medium.
Pamela overpaints the photograph with dry watercolour through an old technique used for botanical miniatures. This process of painting brings subjectivity back to the photographic image; there is manipulation, of course, but it is far removed from a digital strategy. The image is ‘regained’ through this engagement. If photography’s earliest debt was to painting, she wishes to explore how painting may now be reinvested through an ideological reflection upon photography.
Research Funding
Research and KT Development Fund, Royal College of Art, 2017
Pollock–Krasner Foundation Grant, awarded internationally to individuals who have worked as professional artists over a significant period of time, 2012
Awards and commisions
2022 Fellow, The Linnean Society of London
2021 Creative Scotland and Global Yell
2021 RTF Royal College of Art
2019 RTF Royal College of Art
2018 RTF Royal College of Art
2012 Pollock-Krasner Foundation
2008 Smithsonian Institution
Journal of American Art Archives
2007 Marie de Paris, Recollets, Paris
British Council, in Paris
2006 Residency, Resident Recollets, Paris
Winner of the public prize of the Sovereign European Art Prize
2004 Arts Council Award to individual artist
Current and recent projects
Cistus (ongoing)
This series focuses on bringing together the fields of visual culture and music in order to research how the rise of Tiki culture, following the end of prohibition in 1933 in the United States, impacted the knowledge initially within the US of the visual and music cultures of the global majority. I will contemplate gardens and how historically, Western cultures exorcised nature by collecting botanical specimens and moving plants and humans globally to create controlled yet exceptional landscapes. Often, slavery and sacrifice fuelled these gardens.
Fowl ,2024
film commissioned by Hurry Up We’re Dreaming for the Fowl edits a range of images – historical, found and shot – to create a one-minute film that taps into Annie Oakley marksmanship, the suffragettes, whistling, birdsong and It Ain’t Necessarily So, all toned to deliver a colourful meditation.
Phantom Creeps, 2022
A series of works and exhibition. Name for a series and exhibition at New Art Projects, London. The series title alludes to those who are/aren’t there, who came before us and the narratives surrounding them. It consists of 200 watercolours of properties that were for sale in Paris between 2006 and 2007. The title, ‘The Phantom Creeps’ comes from the 1939 horror/sci-fi series starring Bella Lugosi. It also alludes to Walter Benjamin’s thought on phantasmagoria and his reflections on commodity culture and its experience of materials and intellectual products. This series explores both the spaces we inhabit and those spaces we aspire to inhabit.
In a land far away, 2021, Global Yell, Shetland Isles
A series of botanical paintings. Of Night Flowers, the series shown in this exhibition, refers to early photographic techniques. They can be considered a channel to propose questions about the shared problematic dynamics of how we perceive the world through mediated sources, how historic photography pioneered a change in painting, and how the genre of botanical painting is perceived.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Solo Exhibitions
2022 Phantom Creeps, New Art Projects, London
2021 In a land faraway, Global Yell, Shetland Isles
2021 Flower Portraits, Global Yell, Shetland Isles
2018 Thunderstruck, Marlborough Fine Art, London
2015 Charlie Don’t Surf, Marlborough Contemporary, London
2014 Good Morning! Mister Williams., Marlborough Contemporary, London
2013 Auction Paintings, World Legend, Lisbon
2008 Love and Hysteria, Tate Britain, London
2007–8 Love and Hysteria, Fondacion Elektra, Paris
Group Exhibitions
2025 British Art-Convergence, Centro de Arte Moderna, Gulbenkian, Lisbon
2024 Hello, We were talking about Hudson, by Soberscove Press
2022 Phantom Creeps, New Art Projects, London
2017–18 Fazer Sentido / Making Sense, Casa da Cerca, Almada, Portugal
2015 “I never thought I´d see you again”, Painting History, Marlborough Contemporary, London
2013 Cowboy Style, Marlborough Contemporary
2013 London More than I Dare to Think About, Marlborough Contemporary, London
2012 A Sort of Night to the Mind, A Kind Of Night For Our Thoughts, Illusion and Materiality in Contemporary Painting, Artary Gallery, Stuttgart
2011 Biennial, The Drawing Room, London
2011 A Sort of Night to the Mind, A Kind Of Night For Our Thoughts, Illusion and Materiality in Contemporary Painting,
2011 Arch 402, London Print Fair, Karsten Schubert Gallery at the Royal Academy
2010 Abstraction and the Human Figure in CAM’s British Art Collection, Fundacao Calauste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
2009 A Sort of Night to the Mind, A Kind Of Night For Our Thoughts, Illusion and Materiality in Contemporary Painting, Herbert Read Gallery, University of Canterbury, Kent
Publications
2022 Phantom Creeps, New Art Projects
2018 Thunderstruck, Marlborough Fine Art, London
2017–18 Fazer Sentido / Making Sense, Casa da Cerca, Almada, Portugal
2015 Charlie Don’t Surf , London: Marlborough Contemporary
2014 Good Morning! Mister Williams. Book and Record album