Female friendship is rendered into thousands of pixels in Lily Bunney’s pointillist paintings

In the late 19th century, the jacquard loom – a textiles manufacturing device – began using punched cards to weave. These paper-based mediums stored information via the presence or absence of holes, all in predefined positions. The reason why this matters to Lily Bunney, a London-based pointillist painter, is because everything she does is about the presence, or, absence of holes. Lily’s paintings look like tiny JPEGs blown up extremely large, their information scattered and blitzed, becoming tiny cells of data. “The cells in my paintings can be seen both as pixels and as points in a textiles pattern for knit or crochet,” says Lily, connecting the digital now to the tactile past. Using Photoshop to edit the photo and Instagram to create patterns, Lily incorporates half-tone textures to combine burnt sienna, raw umber, cyan and magenta – mixing classic paint colours with hyperdigital ones.

The images Lily paints are defined by fashionable kitsch; young and trendy women engaging in public urination and sports cars, celebrities such as Julia Fox dispersed into thousands of pixels and bronze bodybuilders – yet Lily validates vulgarity with an emphasis on friendship. “I’m influenced by the internet and my friends – how we construct and witness our own stories, particularly in relation to technology and contemporary culture,” says Lily. “I also think about shame often; when the idea of making something embarrasses me I push myself to make it.” Lily’s painting becomes particularly heartfelt when you realise how much time goes into reconstructing every pixel or stitch of a particular moment, be it a handshake, a selfie or several hands creating a star shape. In the act of making, shame is reclaimed and overpowered into glowing, noisy tributes to companionship as well as – perhaps paradoxically – antisociality.