Artist Statement:

Katie Tomlinson’s paintings explore femme representation, performativity and the queering of patriarchal histories. Working through a queer feminist lens, her paintings construct ambiguous, theatrical narratives that interrogate the ways in which femininity is controlled, performed, and represented.

Her paintings draw on theatrical strategies to disrupt familiar ways of looking. By transforming recognisable scenes and images into something strange and unruly, Tomlinson encourages viewers to question what they are seeing. This process of making the familiar strange creates a critical distance, prompting questions around the politics of looking and the cultural narratives that shape everyday representations of gender.

Her paintings operate as both visual inquiries and vehicles for storytelling, with characters whose identities, motivations and histories remain deliberately ambiguous within these queering and subversive narratives. Vivid colour, playful and surreal motifs, layered symbolism and varied applications of paint create scenes charged with tension, humour and shifting meanings. Together, these elements enable Tomlinson to explore the material possibilities of paint alongside narrative, creating work that oscillates between the playful and the unsettling, underpinned by a sense of claustrophobic anxiety, existential unease and impending catastrophe.

The paintings overtly reference moments throughout the canon of Western patriarchal art history. The works reconsider, reconfigure and reclaim specific moments from painting’s problematic past, particularly its depictions of women. These historical references serve as a tool through which Tomlinson develops and reinforces the paintings’ contemporary social themes, mobilising the familiar visual language of art-historical painting to examine how inherited ideas of femininity continue to shape the present in a post-MeToo context.