Zena Blackwell’s work explores the layered and emotionally charged terrain of childhood memory, shaped by the dual perspective of revisiting their own early experiences while observing their children grow up in the present. Positioned simultaneously as the remembered child and the witnessing parent, the artist works within a shifting temporal framework that forms the conceptual foundation of their practice.

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Parenthood has reopened access to memories that had settled into the subconscious, brought to the surface by seemingly incidental moments — a repeated phrase, the weight of a gesture, the ritual of preparing for a family outing. For Zena Blackwell, nostalgia functions not as a sentimental longing for the past but as what theorist Svetlana Boym calls reflective nostalgia — a space of active questioning rather than reconstruction, where memory becomes fluid rather than fixed.

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Each painting becomes an amalgam of recollection, combining vivid childhood impressions with the contemporary experiences of the artist’s own children. Time collapses into layered images that blur past and present, echoing the mnemonic strategies found in the work of artists such as Peter Doig, whose dreamlike figuration similarly inhabits the space between personal archive and collective imagination, or Paula Rego, who reanimates childhood experience through psychological re-staging rather than literal depiction.

The artist is drawn to memories that remain unusually intact — family holidays, shared journeys, transitional moments charged with anticipation, togetherness, or quiet observation. These scenes are not painted as documentary events but as emotional residues, aligning with theorist Marianne Hirsch’s idea of postmemory, in which lived experience and inherited memory intertwine, producing images that are at once personal and universal.

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Formally, Zena Blackwell uses paint and bold colourways and pattern to emulate the behaviour of memory itself: layered, interrupted, selective, sometimes blurred, sometimes startlingly sharp. The works hover between figuration and surrealist compositions, acknowledging that memory does not return as a single image, but as an accumulation of impressions, atmospheres, and partial viewpoints.

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Ultimately, the work asks how childhood is stored within us — not simply as narrative, but as colour, texture, light, sensory rhythm. These paintings inhabit the in-between: past and present, lived and remembered, domestic and mythic. They invite viewers to consider their own archive of formative moments — how they return, distort, repeat, and continue to shape identity long after they have passed.