This series focuses on familiar, mass-produced objects drawn from everyday experience. Instantly recognisable, these forms carry a sense of cultural familiarity while remaining visually direct and uncomplicated.

Each painting presents the full contents of a packet, removed from its packaging and arranged directly. The forms are developed with a high level of control and precision, allowing repetition, variation and surface to be observed closely.

By translating a widely recognised, commercially produced item into paint, the work shifts it from something disposable into something considered. What is ordinarily consumed and discarded is held in place, inviting a slower and more attentive way of looking.

 

"The normal convention for still life paintings is to show the items of value as you would come across them in the house. That won’t be regularly arranged across a white ground, but Lisa Milroy has established that as an alternative mode using such items as shoes, fruit and ceramic pots. The effect is to animate items in their own space. Simon Taylor gives that a humorous and absurd tweak by choosing cheaply cheerful Wotsits as his subject."

Paul Carey-Kent