Anne Carney Raines (b.1990) is a painter from Nashville, Tennessee. She received her painting MA in 2021 at the Royal College of Art in London and is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. She has a background in scenic painting and fabrication which has had a major impact on her artwork as she deals with topics around theatre, transitional space, and collective memory. Notable include: Imago with Imogen Allen ( Soho Revue, London) Kudzu Blue (Wilder Gallery, London),  ‘Drawing Biennial 2024’ (Drawing Room, London), ‘Drawing Attention’ (British Museum touring exhibition), Hopscotch (Soho Revue, London), ‘Pleasure Zones’ (Wilder Gallery, London), ‘Window’, (Dans les Yeux, Paris), London Grads Now (Saatchi Gallery, London), New Contemporaries 2020 and 2021 (Firstsite Gallery, South London Gallery).  

Anne Carney Raines explores the psychological complexities of physical boundaries, the illusions of theatrical space, and the layers of collective memory. Deeply informed by her technical background in scenic painting and fabrication, her practice approaches the canvas as a staging ground where architecture and landscape are constantly negotiation one another. She creates complex, multi-layered environments characterized by rooms within rooms, trompe l’oeil structures, blocking panels, and cascading murals. Rather than copying direct photographic records, she allows personal site memories to intermingle and jumble together, generating a fictional terrain that borders on the uncanny and the artificial.

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Central to her visual storytelling is the deliberate subversion of standard spatial hierarchies. Raines establishes tension by placing structured, geometric decors directly over expansive, realistically rendered backdrops. This painterly scaffolding disrupts how a space is processed, actively obscuring the horizon lines to present a quiet play between human presence and eerie atmospheric absence. Her compositions often function as paintings within paintings, inviting viewers into transitional worlds where the safety of interior domestication and the wild vulnerability of the exterior landscape effortlessly collapse into one another.