MIRANDA BOULTON

Miranda Boulton (b. 1973) is a contemporary British painter who works in London. She studied Art History at Sheffield Hallam University and at Turps Banana Art School in London. Her work has been shown internationally at Art Miami (Miami Basel Week) and Expo Chicago, group shows include Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2016 & 2019), ING Discerning Eye (2019 & 2021), Young Masters Autumn Exhibition & Invitational at the Exhibitionist Hotel (2022-24), and ‘Staged Nature’, Glyndebourne (2023). In 2021 she won the Jacksons Painting Prize. She had her first solo exhibition ‘Ghosts and Flowers’ with Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London, October 2024.
She is a member of Contemporary British Painting and has paintings in many private collections internationally.

Artist Statement

Boulton expressively reinterprets and reinvigorates the genre of floral still life painting by referencing and combining the traditions of Still Life painting and Abstraction within her own mix of vigorous and delicate marks. 

The Still life genre reminds us of the transience of life and the fragility of nature.  Her cut bouquets reflect mans manipulation of nature and hint at its consequences. Historically floral still life painting has been seen as slight and feminine, however, Boulton is not interested in her paintings being gendered, her flowers have strength and muscle, they are untethered with backgrounds void of reference.  She sees them as living organisms in a state of becoming, in their own orbits.

Boulton starts her process by working directly onto the canvas recalling memories of a specific historical floral painting.  Building from the instability of a memory as opposed to directly referencing the work, her desire to respond to the original memory is eventually abandoned as intuition and spontaneity take over and the work writes its own narrative in the layers of paint which are woven together with marks like musical notes, roughed out on the page. The finished paintings retain a feel of the original source in an oblique way, gently nudging association in our memories.

During Boulton’s explosive process, paint is built up and scraped back, the canvas is turned sometimes more than once to destabilise the composition.  Different speeds of marks are used, built up impasto, the blur of large gestures, intricate details, and buttery spray paint.  As the viewer keeps looking the paintings both unravel and reveal through the speed and rhythm of the marks made over time.

Boulton explores sensation through her use of paint; she wants her work to be initially experienced emotionally rather than through language.  Her paintings are both abstractions of and meditations on the history of art, but they are also alive to more urgent, emotional questions surrounding perception and existence itself.
 

‘These works are saturated with thinking about the genre and its canonical practitioners, and never just in the mode of reference, or of establishing herself within a lineage. Boulton treats artists of the past as living resources to push against and experiment with, as interlocutors and channels of intimacy. The constellations guiding her work are many. Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) recur alongside Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), Mary Moser (1744-1819), Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) and Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), to name but a few. By recalling these artists together, their references threading from one work to the next, Boulton creates an imagined cohort of artistic ancestors, and raises questions pertinent to feminist art history. Why is it that when male artists painted still life it was considered profound – in Morandi’s case, almost spiritually so – but when women engaged with the same subject matter they were judged narrow, minor, even amateur? In Boulton’s spirited conversations with tradition, which treat all her chosen artists as equally valuable source material, these gendered distinctions melt away. Boulton’s process ensures these influences never become overbearing.’

‘Flowers are stripped of their associations with conventional femininity, what for centuries connected the ornamental function and essential frailty of flowers with women’s bodies. Instead, these flowers are elastic, energetic and robust. Distortion strategies explode conventional verisimilitude, and produce stretched and melted bouquets, which threaten to engulf the entire canvas.’
Acts of Cross-Pollination: Miranda Boulton’s Still Life by Rebecca Birrell

Click here to listen to Miranda’s Podcast Interview with ‘A Geography of Colour’