Presented at SLQS Gallery, Mia Wilkinson’s solo exhibition HEAD OF THE TABLE is a feast of contradictions: her new series of paintings and sculptures are grotesque yet seductive, comic yet unsettling. Wilkinson's works invite viewers to confront what it means to consume and be consumed in the performance of femininity.
Mia Wilkinson (b. UK) lives and works in London. Her paintings and sculptures explore Western stereotypes of the domestic female, pulling apart the performance of woman as the “angel in the house.” Her figures are charged with grotesque and playful sexuality, placed within lurid domestic scenes that exaggerate and satirize the familiar.
Growing up in a single-parent working-class family in the North East, Wilkinson’s Asian father was absent, leaving her knowledge of that heritage fragmented. Instead, she was shaped by a strong and complicated matriarchy. From them, she learned that a female body holds both social currency and invisibility. This tension—along with her fractured sense of racial identity—fuels the bawdy, unruly women she creates. Her figures parody and pierce cultural expectations and art historical traditions.
Increasingly, Wilkinson also places herself within her work, recognizing that her own presence is uncomfortable and using that discomfort to further challenge the ways women have been depicted in art and how they relate to it. She wants her figures to feel fleshy and irreverent. Through fractured patterns, repetition, and collision, she builds compositions that are both claustrophobic and playful—where bawdy female bodies inhabit overheated spaces and disrupt the domestic sphere.
Wilkinson graduated from MA Painting (2025) at the Royal College of Art and BA Painting (2014) at the Wimbledon College of Art, UAL.
Solo exhibitions include: DOMETICATED HINNY, KoKo, Camden (2023); THIS IS NOT PORN, Public Gallery, London (2018); PLUS SIZE, Espacio Gallery, London (2016). Recent group exhibitions include: felt, expressed, chosen, SLQS Gallery, London (2024); The Way of All Flesh, Saatchi Gallery, London (2024); Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, Donya Gallery, London (2024); REJECTS, Art Friend, London (2024); Kunsthall UG, Augsburg, Germany (2024); Sweet Potion, Artistellar Gallery, London (2023); Two Doors, The House of St Barnabas, London (2022); Retrespect, The Art Bypass Gallery, London (2022).