Estelle Simpson

Estelle identifies with an overwhelming sense of melancholy that colours even the most beautiful parts of life. Seen in the malaise which slowly bleeds out of the canvas, the artist’s ‘in-between’ feeling resists neatly wrapped concepts. Studying ballet from youth, Estelle’s creativity finds itself predominantly expressed on canvas, rather than stage. While imagined scenes are contained within the stretcher edges, they are expansive, just like a fantastical balletic story within the parameters of the curtain.

Estelle Simpson
‘Reach for the Stars’, 2026
Oil on canvas
wxhcm

She utilises a deep understanding of emotion relayed through gesture and movement in the body. The message is revealed in each vein, blemish, and strand of hair that are rendered in meticulous oils over long durational studio sessions. Resisting the fixed self through her framing of alter-egos, there is no obvious beginning or end; just a continuous non-linearity dealt with across all surfaces. With a destined unravelling of the expected and familiar, producing a disquieting effect, a sense of tragedy and sorrow meets beauty and fleeting ecstasy.

And this ‘unravelling’ is mirrored in the evasiveness and edginess of her alter-egos, who embody the refusal of the fixed, stable state. Searching for these contradictions and pluralities in literature, Estelle obsessively records quotes and passages that inform her understanding of the multiple roles we perform in the world. Psychological narratives are threaded loosely, following a stream-of-consciousness prose; a Woolfian appreciation of the interchangeability of written and painted language surfaces on the canvas.

“I think when I’m painting these alter egos, I’m also kind of doing that. I have these alter egos that I’m putting on – not on a stage, but on a canvas. They might be in an environment experiencing something beyond my knowledge, because I’ve created a kind of surreal world for them. But I bring to them a very real emotion, which grounds them”.
Estelle Simpson

“In speaking about the choreographer Pina Bausch, Simpson draws on her as another influence, describing a devotion to environments that are tightly composed while still allowing emotional disarray to emerge. She likens this process to stage direction, where an environment is carefully constructed through props, everyday objects and repeated edits, so that chaos can be directed rather than accidental. Within Simpson’s spaces, her alter egos move through uncertainty.” Alessandro Morter

She shares a kinship in Lygia Fernadez’s kafkaesque novels, especially with the recurrence of the colour motif of green. Making subtle studies of “the green jungles inside us the foliage moist with blood,” she utilises beryl tints that imbue skin with a ghostly, swampy quality. This builds fundamental concepts of the bodies’ organic decay and, in equal parts, imbues a supernatural glow in subjects. Two truths emerge: the fragility of our aging, lived in skin suits, and the natural, unperceivable fluorescence we emit. These are the strengths and weaknesses we all inhabit, in essence, employing green glazes between the layers of skin grounds these images in a reality we can all empathise with, probing the universality of the bodily.

“Her visual monologue tests the edges between reality and reverie through object characterisation, compressed bodies and carefully staged, fever-like atmospheres that read as diaries written in paint rather than neat illustrations.” Alessandro Morter 

“I have always learned to express myself through the body and to feel emotions in the body. So when I paint figures, they do have quite an exaggerated emotion or a dramatic look to them. But I think that is just because that is my understanding of how to really portray a feeling”.
Estelle Simpson

The places depicted in these paintings are echoes of everyday life, easily observed from the edge of a bathtub, the arm of a chair, or the reflection of a mirror. Yet, what arises is Estelle’s use of the painted image to transcend the physical boundaries of these interior places, reminiscent of the way she applies creativity to transcend confinement of four walls. In this regard, the paintings hold a silver lining: even within limited realities we can find hope, or failing this, purpose, through the imagination.


Multilayered in her approach, each painting has time worked into it. A veneer of glamour reveals hidden depths upon sustained attention. She strives in each painting for it to be striking enough to entrance you, but embodies the longevity of the process, to keep you. The method resists the rapidity of image circulation: these paintings cannot be processed immediately and quickly discarded. They provide a visuality to ponder, slowly revealing themselves or allowing clear absences to emerge. From her archival ballet production images to the projections of a 21st century psychological malaise, Estelle depicts each subject and “object that joined that life and this” to question the very nature of her own existence in both the past and the present. This creates a tension between known and unknown, or seen and unseen, which is an underlying concept in Estelle’s oeuvre.

“Her practice holds ballet and its shadows as one of its recurring themes, alongside other charged (yet often unseen) arenas of everyday performance. During our conversation, she defined her figures as “alter egos”, holding the weight of the figures’ bodies through scrupulously blended oils that lend a dewy, post-exertion sheen. This attention to implied sweat becomes a narrative engine, inviting us to imagine the intensity of an already spent routine, whether on stage, in studio or behind closed doors. Through this light, Simpson then steps into the role of Maître de Ballet, and her studio gathers as an exhausted company.” Alessandro Morter

“In Lygia Fagundes Telles’s Tigrela surrealism is accessed through the everyday. The terrors and anxieties in the stories are set in domestic spaces, but a supernatural energy arrives through characters described with animalistic imagery. I found her hugely inspiring and really wanted to capture the ambience and atmosphere of her writing”. Estelle Simpson

“It takes place in an apartment and is told through the account of a woman describing her roommate, who has this tigress-like spirit. The story shines a light on a private world and constantly blurs the line between woman and animal: sometimes she’s described as human, sometimes as a creature, and you’re never sure which is “true.” That uncertainty really inspires me. I love how Telles introduces the idea that a character might be human or animal without resolving it – you’re left wondering whether she’s living with a tiger or simply a very eccentric woman, and that lack of a clear answer is what I find so compelling”. Estelle Simpson

Inevitably, the everyday is out of joint in works, juxtaposing and blurring themes touching performance, the fundamentals of nature, and personal memories. This collision of disparate worlds disrupts expected rhythms associated with our solitary, domestic lives: shifting between interior setting and scale, paintings trace these deceptions. The genesis of this series, Infinite Lounging, prompted from an atmospheric fusing of non-linear time and the hidden horrors in domesticity in the novella ‘The Victorian Chaise-Lounge’, captures an inertial horizontal female figure and a bizarre animalistic fur compromising the reflective surface of a mirror. Once again echoed in a compact, in Soft Touch I and ‘’ II, which depicts the primal geometry of fur, in which she goes to great lengths to magnify the complexity of individual hair strands, isolating the protection provided by this second skin worn by the unidentifiable figure. Several small portraits of masked or obscured faces extend this investigation into how we direct or disguise attention, rendered in precise, acid-sharp paint strokes which seem to contradict the unclear identities of subjects.

“Returning to those beryl glazes of Portière Labyrinth, especially where the face and hands carry the most narrative charge, Simpson intensifies these areas, giving them statements of decay and radiance. Then the painting becomes a stage on which Simpson tests how far a single body (and a single image) can stretch between exhaustion and luminosity, injury and poise.” Alessandro Morter 

“When I was growing up, I was always being taught sewing and crafts and knitting. That’s been really important for me. So when I think about the relationships that shape my identity – the ones I’m now working through with these alteregos in the paintings – they’re really formed by my grandma, my mum, my sister. They’re all people who make intricate things with their hands. So it’s not surprising that I now sit in the studio, meticulously pinning and arranging things on the canvas. That’s what I absorbed in those early years, just as much as I absorbed ballet.
That’s why pins and needles and scissors started to feel like grounding, autobiographical images. When I’m building these worlds, I feel like I’m inside the objects as much as I’m inside the alter egos. It’s another way of being present in the painting.” Estelle Simpson

“Whereas I think when you’re a dancer on the stage and you’re suggesting emotions through the body, it can be almost very ambiguous - I think that infiltrated my understanding of how emotions exist in reality. They can be ambiguous, and sometimes they’re a collision of things. And sometimes the body doesn’t actually, like, portray the inner emotion as well”. 
Estelle Simpson

“Historically, through a more religious lens, the curtain between spaces marks the divide between human society and the divine. I’m adapting that idea so that the everyday becomes human society, and the ‘divine’ becomes the transgressions we can access on the other side, through disguise and masking. In that sense, the figure in Portière Labyrinth is getting wrapped up, caught in this in-between space. The work stages these right-in-between elements in my practice: the figure, the curtain, the room itself – all suspended between one state and another.” Alessandro Morter

This focus on attention is observed most in one of her most recent paintings Quasi Cavort, in which the figure appears to be making a decidedly performative movement for the audience, whilst conversely shifting away off the canvas border to hide somewhere outside of the picture plane. The further fragmentation of the canvas shape into two panels, which results in an adjoining smaller scale canvas taking captive the hand, further interrogates the notion of wanting to be seen and unseen. Even if the character is purposefully attempting to disappear, the isolated spotlighting of the hand signifies a contraproductivity to this, calling into question if we even have the authority to decide.

“I feel that I want to almost unmask the performance as well as portray it. I’m drawing on something I know from my brief dance past, and using that familiarity not just to convey the beauty and reverence of it, but also this underlayer that people don’t see beneath the dancer on the stage. When I’m watching, I’m always aware of the hours of practice, the pain, the heaviness of the body after training. Because my works are grounded in reality, I want them to carry that weight as well”.
Estelle Simpson

This exhibition invites you to step into the heightened drama, darkly humorous, embellished storylines, and the performative self, embracing the oblique nature of being.

I would like to thank David and Elsa, and all other contributors, for their generosity and co-opporation in the making of this exhibition.