Winging It - Solo exhibition by Zena Blackwell curated by Carrie Scott

Carrie Scott is pleased to present Winging It, a solo exhibition of new paintings by award-winning Welsh figurative painter Zena Blackwell. Curated by Scott - art historian, curator and founder of Seen - the exhibition forms part of the gallery’s Maternity Series. About 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. There is humour here too. Blackwell's figures can be awkward, defiant, funny and completely self-possessed. The children in these paintings may be vulnerable, but they are never powerless. That distinction matters. Considered specifically for Liminal Gallery, the UK's smallest bricks-and-mortar contemporary gallery, the works range from just 10 x 10 cm upwards. Rather than treating the gallery's scale as a limitation, Blackwell uses intimacy as part of the encounter. These are paintings that ask the viewer to come close. The exhibition also marks Blackwell's return to the coast. She grew up near the sea in Rhoose, South Wales, and has developed a longstanding relationship with Margate. Increasingly, the coastline has entered her work not simply as landscape but as another unstable boundary: a place where solid ground meets something unknowable and constantly changing. Blackwell sees a shared vulnerability between the Welsh and Kent coastlines, both shaped, and threatened, by their relationship with the water. Winging It follows an especially productive period in Blackwell's studio, including the creation of a group of large-scale paintings for the BEEP Painting Biennial 2024 winners' exhibition at Elysium Gallery, Swansea. Blackwell was awarded the Friends of the Glynn Vivian Prize at the Biennial. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the National Library of Wales as well as significant international private collections, and she has exhibited at venues including Saatchi Gallery and Hastings Contemporary. The exhibition is the first physical collaboration between Blackwell and Scott, who has followed the artist's practice for several years, and precedes a larger solo presentation planned for Los Angeles in February 2027. For Scott, it is precisely the contradictions in Blackwell's work that make it so compelling: “There is enormous fragility in Zena’s paintings, but there is also extraordinary poise. That is what stops them ever becoming sentimental. These children and animals can appear vulnerable, awkward or caught in moments they don’t entirely understand, but the paintings themselves are incredibly sure of themselves. Zena somehow manages to hold tenderness and strength in the same image. It’s that strange balance that I keep coming back to.” Read more Toggle Painting