Celia Paul

Celia Paul was born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India. She lives and works in London.

She mines complexities of interior and exterior life, looping back and forth through time to the people and places closest to her. From 1977 to 2007 she worked on a series of paintings of her mother, and since then she has concentrated on painting her four sisters, especially her sister Kate, as well as a number of portraits of other family members and close friends. She has also produced a large number of evocative self-portraits over the course of her career. Constancy and change, and how the past is always held in dialogue with the eternal present of the painted image, are, for Paul, inextricably linked to a consideration of self: the immediate self as well as the selves we have been in shadows, mirrors or memories, and the many selves we recognise or perhaps refute in the perception of others.

Further cornerstones of Paul’s art include seascapes and depictions of her home and studio. Home as a quest and a question is an encompassing theme, while water, representing the eternal, the flow of time, or a sense of bodies becoming dissolute and consciousness shifting to a more elemental plane, is an enduring motif. Together, they lend Paul’s work its particular tempo of movement and stasis, while a new-found sense of self-acceptance, even defiance, in Paul’s recent self-portraits suggests that concepts of rootedness and belonging might reside not in a physical place so much as in a state of being, which for Paul lies in the act of painting.