Working across visual art, graphic design, DJing, and text, Gabriella Brown also known under her dual monograms Soft Edges and Rev Lon, has grounded her practice in the power of sensory nostalgia. Through vibrant, surreal landscapes, she explores the intersections of memory, sound, and natural form, using design and music to build environments that bridge her personal inner world with the external realities of contemporary life. Described in three words, Colourful, Layered & Abstract, her work exists somewhere between a dreamscape and a document. Each creation functions as both a reflection and a reimagining, inviting viewers into spaces where nature, nostalgia, and sub-bass textures coexist.
At the heart of this work is a deep connection to the natural world and the sky. Rather than treating environmental elements as a simple backdrop or visual motif, Brown approaches them as a vessel for emotion and collective memory. For her, gradients in the sky, water, flowers, and anything that shimmers or glistens act as a living archive of beauty. This relationship to organic scenery shapes not only her subject matter, but her artistic rhythm. Influenced heavily by the hand-drawn, fuzzy background landscapes of vintage animation like early Disney or The Smurfs, her illustrations move with fluidity, depth, and a slightly surreal quality, feeling less like static images and more like portals into faraway spaces seen through unfocused eyes.
An equally vital influence comes from a very different environment is sound. The dualism of her practice, navigating the world as both a DJ and a designer, allows music and art to constantly feed into one another. Her creative process is deeply intuitive, driven by feeling rather than rigid methodology. She finds joy in simply absorbing her surroundings with no immediate "creative intention," allowing her brain to organically process textures before translating them into the gloopy, wavy, wobbly shapes that define her visual work today. It is this raw sincerity that gives her work its resonance, translating personal memories into narratives that connect on a profoundly human level, catching a window into a world that only she resides in.
A major turning point in her artistic journey happened on a six-hour bus ride to Paris. Running on empty with a sleep-deprived brain and a laptop clinging to its last bit of battery, Brown leaned entirely into her instincts. The result was “Harsher Harsher,” a three-piece digital series that she describes as a wild, sparkly, purple, deep-cave-dwelling, diamond-mining, weirdly cosmic artwork. Sharing it on Instagram with the expectation that it was too weird for the public, she was met with an insane wave of love. The reception proved that art can hold seemingly opposing emotions at once, the hyper-personal and the universal. More importantly, it solidified a central truth of her practice, the work that feels the most authentically true to herself is the work most worth pursuing.
Now, that commitment to worldbuilding is entering a new chapter. After years of developing characters and environments through illustration, Brown is looking toward music production and tactical design. She is expanding her signature aesthetic into a clothing brand, experimenting with bleach and dye techniques that perfectly mirror her fluid visual style. Beyond garments, sinking her teeth into electronic production isn't a departure; it’s the natural evolution of her dual identity. The chance to pull her illustrated worlds off the screen and into three-dimensional capsule collections and sonic soundscapes represents her next frontier.
Underlying all of this is a firm critique of how creativity is being systematically devalued. To emerging artists, her advice is grounded in self-discovery and relentless experimentation. In a challenging creative landscape bulldozed by AI-generated work, overconsumption, and consumerism, she champions continuous learning and finding out who you are by any means necessary. She holds the same resilient vision for her own practice. Even without a sunny resolution to the industry's shifts, she envisions a future defined by persistence and choosing to keep creating with her human brain and human hands, simply because she cannot not.
