C3 • London 2015 Installed August 2015

Street art, perhaps even mainstream art in the wider context, seems to focus the viewer with the old adage ‘two ideas, three colours’. Here, colour, stripped back to the primaries, exposes emotional energy and a spectrum of impulsive responses. And red, more than any other colour, evokes a bold passion and excitement.

Add the female form into the mix, and fireworks flow. Artists across time have been drawn to the power of the red-headed muse. Think Sandro Botticelli's 'The Birth of Venus', and the varied masterpieces by Dante Rossetti, Egon Schiele, Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo Modigliani, Gustav Klimt.

Is British street artist C3 following this long line of tradition, with her carmine-curled second self, often found 'chilling out on various windows and ledges'?

Four years on from her launch in 2011, Sheffield-based C3 leaves her delicate, diminutive sitting ladies out in the urban landscape, pensive, engaging and sanguine.

With red hair occurring naturally in only 1–2% of the human population, it is no coincidence that these seemingly flimsy, gossamery figures are fashioned from the rare and bygone.

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