WG: Your connection to the natural world, in particular to woodlands is evident and integral to your practice. Could you please share more about this?

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XB: I’ve spent a lot of time reading literature and theory that contextualises why I’m so interested in woodland as a site for painting layered visions of myth, history and folklore. But at the heart of it, my connection to the woods was felt long before I began to understand its cultural context. It was the bark on my feet as I climbed a tree, the pang of unease as a story came a little too close to the surface. The woods of these early imaginings were the woodlands that fringed Dartmoor in South Devon, temperate rainforests dripping with mosses, lichen and ferns. This connection to place, to its folklore, is the surface on which I build my practice. Painting is a way to layer these stories and memories to open a portal to the woods where the old gods linger. To engage with the natural world in a way that doesn’t pastoralize landscape as Rebecca Tamás puts it in her essay on Green: ‘not the impossibly pure space of “wilderness” or the controlled beauty of “Landscape” but the human and nonhuman intertwined, bursting out of each other with discomfort, joy, pleasure’.

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WG: Who are the women in the three portraits?

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XB: When I was starting to research these works I had just finished my MA and was feeling the weight of endings and what a future as a painter might look like. For the final group trip with the RCA we went to the conservation studios at the Tate Britain and then to see the show Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920. The three portraits are referencing paintings in that show - some self-portraits and some society miniatures. The painting Only Known Work was inspired by the portrait of Mary Grace (died c.1799), an incredibly accomplished artist whose self-portrait holding a palette and brushes looks out at the viewer, claiming her position as a painter. The wall text quite casually mentioned that this astonishing painting was her only known work. I obsessed over the idea of all her lost and misattributed paintings - of how her work was disregarded for so long and how a legacy we are now trying to piece together has been eroded by time. I made these tangled portraits thinking about women artists, lost paintings and tales of metamorphosis.

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WG: You are currently an artist in residence at Studio West Residency. What does an average studio day look and feel like? What do you listen to when you work?

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XB: The residency has been amazing. It's three months in a beautiful gallery space in the heart of Notting Hill with an open studio at the end of November. I like to get into the studio early and look at the work from the day before and the unfinished pieces in the studio. I work on lots of paintings at the same time and sometimes a piece will be unresolved for months. I move the work around constantly, putting it in different lights, next to other paintings, upside down. Something eventually will make it click and then I’ll work on it intensely. I’ll work on several paintings or drawings in a day - I’ll paint a passage and move to something else and then when I come back to the first painting I can see it with fresh eyes again. Lots doesn’t make it through that process - I’ll wipe out a whole day's work if I need to.

I choose music that sets the tone for the kind of work I’m doing. Recently I’ve been listening a lot to Nadine Shah, Fever Ray and Baxter Dury if I need energy and King Creosote or Nilüfer Yanya if I want to focus. Sometimes when the work I’m doing is very detailed and focused I just need silence so I can disappear into the process of it.

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WG: Would you say your process is intuitive? Please share more about what your creative process is like?

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XB: I sometimes think I have a clear idea of what a painting will be when I begin and then in the process of making it it always evolves and becomes something else. I used to find this really overwhelming - like my paintings took on a life of their own and wouldn’t let me make the changes I had planned. But I’ve learnt to trust this intuition and see where it takes me - often I’ll begin with a semi-abstract background guided by a few key references or ideas. For example, for the Artist Focus works I wanted the colours and light to speak to high summer - to the deep green of the leaves and the high pale blue skies of Italian renaissance paintings.

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WG: Could you kindly share more about your connection to your nominated charity and why you have selected it?

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XB: I have worked with Create for a couple of years as a facilitator. It’s a great joy to see the impact of art in real time. How important it is for people to draw, paint and sculpt in a community setting.​​​​​