Megan Rea is a painter living and working in London after graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2016. The past year has forced Rea to rethink the scale of her paintings and the surface that she works on. Producing work away from the studio encouraged Rea to use accessible materials and begin experimenting with a new process.

Rea's current practice celebrates fictitious cityscapes in Italian frescoes by reimagining them as architectural fragments in their freshly painted state. Inspired by the shallow perspective of medieval Sienese and Florentine works, building facades are stripped of their adornments and abstracted, angled to bring them to life in a playful trompe I'oeil. Early renaissance structures depicted in paintings by Fra Angelico and Giotto are re-envisaged in concertina form, enhancing the strength and vigor of the original buildings.

The preparatory technique involves finely blending newspaper with water, draining it, and rolling the pulp onto a wooden board to dry. In some way, this reflects the arduous preparation of the frescoes where layers of plaster were applied before the outline of the composition, sinopie, was painted with an earth-coloured wash in preparation for the final thin layer of plaster, intonaco.

"Volume and perspective are achieved in the fresco pieces with the subtle employment of light and shade and I have used colour washes to mimic the once vibrant, now friable appearance of the fresco cycles. This effect is enhanced by the dampened then dried newspaper and echoes the gradual decomposition of the plaster in a number of the fresco cycles, a reminder of the passage of time and of the transitory nature of life itself."