The intimate works of British artist Felicity Powell (1961–2015) are charged with presence and a poetic, surreal beauty. Over
the course of a 30-year career, Powell developed a richly associative practice spanning sculpture, drawing, photography
and video, through which she explored the interconnected realms of myth, science and belief. Widely recognised for
reinvigorating the medallic tradition, Powell also curated several acclaimed exhibitions that broadened critical engagement
with the medium.

Born in London in 1961, Powell studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London, between 1983 and 1986. She was awarded
a Gulbenkian Scholarship to the British School at Rome in 1986–87, and remained in the city for several years afterwards.
Rome proved a formative influence, inspiring Powell through the traces of lives and histories embedded within the city’s
architecture. During this period, scale, movement and light became increasingly vital to her practice, along with imagery
both ephemeral and intangible: zooplankton, tears and water droplets; skeletal leaves and ripples on water; modelled in
wax, etched into glass or accumulated on the surface of patinated bronze.

In 2000, Powell won a competition to design the Millennium Medal for the Royal Mint, a project that led her on a new path
of exploration. Her winning design featured a dandelion head as a symbol of the cosmos and its scattered spores like a clock:
a direct allusion to nature’s fragility and the swift passage of time. Other medal commissions soon followed, including those
for the Linnaean Society, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Inspired by
intaglios, coins and medals of the past and by the Renaissance reliefs of Pisanello, Donatello and Arnolfo di Cambio, Powell
approached medals as small-scale sculptures; as objects with heft and a pleasing, hand-held scale.
In 2009, drawing on a counter-cultural strand within medallic history, Powell organised the landmark exhibition Medals of
Dishonour with curator Philip Attwood at the British Museum. Two years later, in 2011, she curated Charmed Life: The Solace
of Objects at the Wellcome Collection, London.

Powell’s work has been exhibited at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2013); the Wellcome Collection, London
(2011); the British Museum, London (2009; 2001); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2002–04; 2005); the Monnaie
de Paris (2002); Norwich Castle Museum, UK; and the Goethe National Museum, Weimar, Germany (2000). Her selected
commissions include Drawn From the Well for the V&A Cast Courts (2002); medals for the Department of Coins and Medals,
British Museum (2010; 2000); the Linnean Society, London (2010; 2007); the Victoria and Albert Museum (2009; 2001); the
Mo Ibrahim Foundation (2008; 2007); and the Millennium Medal Competition for the Royal Mint and the British Art Medal
Society (2000).