‘I became a parent and had a really difficult journey getting there,’ says British painter Ellis King, who is examining the quiet spaces where unresolved trauma lives in her debut exhibition at London’s SQFT: Space Gallery.
It makes sense that King turned inwards when creating her paintings, which are both deeply autobiographical and highly charged. Her scenes capture the mundanity of existence, yet sizzle with the tension inherent in a moment when experience briefly catches up with you, unawares – in King’s paintings, women freeze at the sink, or in the bath, lost in a recollection.
‘It changes something inside you when you have a baby, and I think that, coupled with the stress of my experience, switched something in me that I hadn’t been aware of before,’ King says. ‘It was a bit like the blinkers were removed and I suddenly saw, on a small scale, how many women experience these huge, life-changing things, and then you’re just kind of left to crack on. It was all of that we go through that’s just never seen or heard.’
King’s distinctive style sits somewhere between reality and abstraction, her self-portraiture a foil rooted in realism, jarring against the sharp graphics and flat planes upon which she sits. ‘Working in self-portraiture meant I could be honest about the emotions I’d actually felt – disgust, shame, pity, exhaustion – rather than softening them,’ says King. ‘Those quieter moments are so often set at home, too. It holds some of the best and worst moments of our lives, and yet so much of what happens there stays unseen. A lone figure in a domestic space can carry a huge amount without anything dramatic happening at all. The quiet moments are where so much of women’s private experience lives, unremarked on, easy to miss, but often where the real weight sits.’
For King, the paintings become a way to explore and consider her own anger, at a system which lets women down, and at the expectations women are held to. Ultimately, though, she wants the works to begin a conversation, rather than an argument. By rooting these scenes in her personal experience, King opens the doors for a dialogue in a new medium. ‘Quite honestly, I think I came back to painting partly out of rage at the system, and partly because I needed somewhere for all of that experience to go. I’d always painted portraiture, so it was the natural language for me to return to. I didn’t fully realise it at the time, but painting became a way of processing what had happened. That experience has stayed at the centre of my practice. It’s what made me interested in the things women carry quietly.’
Spilt Milk at SQFT: Space Gallery until 5 November