Jacqueline Utley

There is a sense of contingency, of capturing a very private moment shared between women in the paintings of Jacqueline Utley. These paintings might be described as an exploration of the gendered spaces that women have occupied for living, working and making work. Utley started exploring these spaces in a number of works that she made after her return to art school in order to do an MA after a two decade career hiatus after her BA at Chelsea. She also made a number of small paintings of flowers in vases set against modest, plain backgrounds where the petals of the flowers are a vivid but contained burst of colour against the almost monochrome backgrounds. 

Utley has talked about how she started making these works in response to women painters in museum collections who were born around the start of the twentieth century. This has become a key strand of her practice that is rooted in research work. Utley’s own family history of women working in textile mills in the north of England also fed into her interest in researching sources that documented the lives of women workers from the early part of the twentieth century. She also draws on family photographs, art historical sources, magazines and journals that feature women artists and makers and the spaces they worked in. Her paintings wear these references lightly, working on each painting over a long period of time so that they gradually move away from those sources into her own distinctive visual language.

Utley has a BA (Hons) in Painting from Chelsea School of Art (1989) and an MA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts (2008). Along with her own practice, Utley engages in collaborative practice-based research projects on work by overlooked women artists. Her first solo show with the gallery took place in Autumn 2024 and Utley will participate in a group show at the gallery in Spring 2025.