About

I paint artefacts of a history that hasn’t quite happened. Through painting, I resurrect historical events often dismissed as bizarre, unexplainable, or singular, and re-situate them within broader cultural and psychological contexts. I prefer to move away from the salaciousness with which these strange and often tragic episodes are usually narrated and instead focus on their deeper causes and effects. I’m particularly drawn to the early twentieth century: an era of profound societal change that parallels what we find ourselves in one hundred years on. My highly stylised world references an extreme rigidity and precise detail used by interwar British painters, which I see as an escapist tool for systematising their surroundings in flux. Painting’s inherent ambiguity offers space for nuance. Many of the sources I draw from are difficult to understand from a 21st-century perspective; by reimagining them, I hope to animate these distant pasts and invite reconsideration without demanding definitive conclusions.​

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My current body of work is an exploration of the European relationship with nature between the two World Wars. Although many attempted to turn to the natural world as a means to escape and remedy the trauma of conflict in the machine age, my paintings reflect on stories wherein subjects struggled to relinquish the desire to dominate. By focusing on ways in which a world that wants to grow wild and free may be constricted, the series critiques an innate entitlement seemingly ingrained within white Europeans in this era, and how that rubs up against the contemporary fall of empire.

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Hargreaves (b. 2000) is a painter based in London. She graduated from Goldsmiths with a BA in Fine Art in 2022 and from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting in 2024, the latter selecting her work as its annual painting acquisition. She has also previously been awarded the Tooth Travelling Scholarship and the BAGT Open Founder’s Prize, been a finalist for the ACS Studio Prize and Valerie Beston Prize, and been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize.