"solo, flight, stripe" Painting

'The domestic setting is beautiful, still, and a touch awkward.'
- Sacha Craddock - Art critic, writer, curator)

'Zena Blackwell is a must' - Carrie Scott, Art Historian and curator and founder of SEEN

ABOUT

Zena Blackwell is an award-winning British figurative painter based in Cardiff, Wales. She holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins and a BA from Wimbledon School of Art, and most recently completed the Turps Correspondence Course. Blackwell has been shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Show and twice for the BEEP Painting Prize, winning the Friends of the Glynn Vivian* Prize at Beep in 2024. In 2017 she was awarded first prize at Cardiff MADE Summer Open, and in 2019 third prize at PS Mirabel's open exhibition PAINT, Manchester. She has exhibited at Saatchi Gallery and Hastings Contemporary, among other institutions, and her work is held in the permanent collection of the National Library of Wales and in private collections internationally, including by an Art News top 200 collector.

Blackwell's practice centres on the psychological landscape of childhood, memory, and family life. Working in oil paint, she stages figures — most often children — within richly patterned, domestic interiors that carry an atmosphere of stillness and latent tension. Drawing on personal memory and cultural nostalgia, her paintings explore the formative dynamics of childhood and adolescence, identity, and belonging: moments of play, dress-up, and quiet contemplation rendered with an emotional charge that hovers between the familiar and the unsettling. The domestic setting becomes a psychological stage, in which gesture, gaze, and decorative detail conspire to reveal what is felt but rarely spoken.
*Plus TATE member gallery


ARTIST STATEMENT

My paintings explore various themes of adolescence and childhood, drawing from my own experiences as a child and my role as a parent.
Observing my two children growing up, and the evolving dynamics between them and us all as a family unit, has deepened my fascination with nostalgia and memory, which play a central role in my recent work.
Each painting becomes an amalgamation of recollections - fusing sharp memories from my own childhood with those of my children. I often reflect on the memories that resonate more vividly, and find that they are frequently associated with family outings and holidays - those fleeting yet highly significant moments that shape our sense of self and belonging.