I have had this letter in my notebook for days, trying to update my software, technology is my downfall. It’s now early Sunday morning and so nice to sit down in the quiet with a coffee and finally write to you.

I’ve nearly finished my show. Maybe down to the final three paintings and possibly an entry into an art prize if I can get my act together. When I start painting for a show, I get halfway through and finally feel that I’m in the zone, feel like I sort of know what I’m doing. But then, I look back on the initial paintings, and they no longer feel right, like they were more of a warmup, so out comes the sandpaper. It is definitely a very annoying part of my process but eventually the cycle ends and the circle closes. Do you know what I mean? The earlier ones are gone and hopefully all the work now seems consistent and cohesive. I have come to accept that this is just part of my process but maybe I could warm up on some scrap paper. The other benchmark for whether I am happy with the paintings is, do I feel a little bit sad as I wrap it before sending it off? I am sad to see it go? If not, then maybe it shouldn’t be going? It’s all a bit torturous to be honest but there it is. I’m about a week away from delivering the work to Boom gallery and I can already sense that deflated feeling after a show is done. I always think I’m going to be relieved but it’s not true. All that stress and worry and panic and sleepless nights and sore jaw from grinding my teeth, but then I look around my little studio and the aftermath of the work, the wilted flowers, sketchbooks strewn, slightly rotting apples, my knitting on the chair, my heater that goes on at 6.30 am so it’s cosy by 8am, dropping paintings at the framer, picking them up, moving them around, standing up close and looking at all the details and layers and moments of brush marks and paint on surfaces, moments I can barely remember now. Months of being engrossed and immersed and then it is done and all the things I thought I was so looking forward to doing when I finally have the time, all pale in comparison to painting. I just want to paint.

I’m calling my show As Essential As Housework. It definitely requires an explanation, a clear artist statement that clarifies the fact that I am not as into cleaning my house as the title might imply. It comes from something I read in a essay by Chris Stephens, about one of my favourite painters, Ben Nicholson.

“Nicholson compared his manner of working with the memory of his mother scrubbing the kitchen table. The comparison is typical of an artist who could both prioritise his art over everything else and undermine any sense of pomposity or grandeur. He set out to show that the making of art was ordinary and domestic, as essential as housework. He saw this as a reaction against the slickness of his father’s effortlessly fluent painting.

I have argued elsewhere that his continual emphasis on the handmade quality of the surfaces of his works associates them both with the vernacular, craft traditions and with the domestic realm. In defiance of what is often seen as the dominant masculine aggressiveness of modernism, Nicholson set out to establish a feminised modern art that focused on the domestic, the private and the intimate.”

This essay speaks to my insecurities around years as a stay-at- home mother, wrongly under valuing that role, it speaks to the quality I am trying to achieve in my practice, deliberately trying to reveal the hand of the maker in my work, layers of thought, mistakes, corrections, the process transparent to the viewer. But most of all it speaks to the me about the importance of my domestic space, a place I have referenced always, often doubting the relevance of such a subject matter in contemporary art, but always coming back to as my enduring muse. I have to remind myself of all of this when I start to doubt whether entering a still life into a contemporary art prize is a waste of time. It can’t be.

The heater is on in my studio, I have some knitting on the needles, I am obsessed with lace collars at the moment, about to start my third! I know you are loving them too. Next letter I will have a book to tell you about, determined to try and read a bit more when the dust settles. I’m feeling like something Scottish and mystical if you have any suggestions?

X Stacey

Underpainting
Collar knitting
“Still Life with Gum Blossom”

Dear Lizzie (9 Aug ‘26),

Dear Stacey, (15 July ‘26)