I’m Poppy Kettle, a London-based figurative painter exploring the relationship between emotion, femininity and performance, and particularly the distance between who we are, how we present ourselves and how we are perceived.
At the heart of my work is a fascination with the difference between being someone and being understood as someone.
I’m interested in how femininity operates as a visual language: something we inhabit, construct, exaggerate or use to influence how others see us. Through clothing, makeup, posture and expression, we can shape the way we’re perceived, but those outward choices don’t necessarily reflect how we feel internally. The performance of femininity can be a source of pleasure, confidence and power, while simultaneously carrying expectations and assumptions that are beyond our control.
My experience of being autistic informs my fascination with how emotion is communicated, performed and interpreted. An expression can be genuine, exaggerated, consciously constructed or entirely misunderstood. We constantly attempt to understand one another through external signals, yet the same expression can communicate entirely different things to different people. I’m interested in this uncertainty, and in how much of our understanding of another person is shaped by our own expectations.
Drawing on the visual language of vintage pin-up imagery and cinematic glamour, my paintings explore the tension between the person being looked at and the assumptions of the viewer. I’m particularly interested in taking imagery historically associated with the male gaze and questioning that relationship, allowing femininity to be something the women I paint inhabit and perform on their own terms, rather than something that exists solely for the viewer.
Through exaggerated expressions, tightly cropped compositions, saturated colour and expressive oil paint, I explore how we construct an understanding of another person from what they choose, or appear, to reveal.
Painting feels like a particularly compelling medium for investigating these ideas. Faced with an image of another person, we instinctively begin to interpret them, assigning emotions, intentions and identities based on what we can see. Yet their internal experience remains unknowable.
Ultimately, I’m interested in that space between what is expressed, what is felt and what is understood, and in how much of ourselves can ever truly be communicated through the way we appear to others.