WINGING IT

Carrie Scott is pleased to present Winging It, a solo exhibition of new paintings by award-winning Welsh figurative painter Zena Blackwell at Liminal Gallery. Curated by Scott - art historian, curator and founder of Seen - the exhibition forms part of the gallery’s Maternity Series.

There is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of Zena Blackwell’s paintings. They are full of vulnerability, but they are not fragile paintings.

Children teeter and stare. They dress up and disappear into themselves. Animals and birds arrive with the strange significance they have in dreams. Domestic spaces slip between the familiar and the uncanny. There is vulnerability in every canvas — the vulnerability of childhood, of parenthood, of bodies, of the places we think will keep us safe. And yet Blackwell paints all of this with extraordinary poise.

It is the tension between uncertainty and assurance, tenderness and strength, precariousness and control that sits at the centre of Winging It.

The title comes from a small painting Blackwell first made in 2020 and has returned to at a moment of significant personal and artistic change. But it also describes something fundamental about the territory of these paintings. Childhood is, inevitably, a process of winging it. So is parenthood. Perhaps making a painting is too.

Blackwell has long drawn from the visual language of childhood: costume, play, animals, family photographs and the peculiar theatre of domestic life. But nostalgia in her work is rarely comfortable. Her paintings resist the temptation to sentimentalise childhood. Instead, they acknowledge its strangeness: the intense seriousness of play, the vulnerability of being small, the sometimes unsettling gap between what a child experiences and what an adult imagines they are experiencing.