Pippa El-Kadhi Brown: A World Inside Out

The Studio 

The plumed tails of a strange avian creature stretch comet-like across ‘The Fly’, a new, sonorous painting by Pippa El-Kadhi Brown, which I am shown from a distance of 262km on a Friday afternoon. 

I briefly become the fly as Pippa gives me a whizzing virtual tour of her studio in the newly renovated Grosvenor West building at Manchester School of Art, where she began the Freelands Studio Fellowship in February 2024.

The fellowship has offered a seismic shift to the usual cadence of Pippa’s practice, providing a caesura within which to reflect – to experiment formally with paint, pushing it beyond the artist’s ritual chalkiness, and to pursue new ideas catalysed by the acts of both teaching and making. 

The studio is bright with steepled windows. Behind Pippa, students graze about their own modular areas with studied concentration. A hedgehog of paintbrushes sits atop a paint-encrusted butcher’s block. I see a trolley stuffed with artistic bric-a-brac and books, concertinaed drawings pinned to the walls and canvases piled high, montage-like, with forms on the brink of coalescing. 

New Cosmos 

Throughout the artist’s early career, Pippa’s work has centred on the domestic. She works primarily with oil paints, creating colourful tableaus that complicate our experience of familiar household scenes through unsettling, prismatic palettes.

In her paintings, recognisable motifs – taps, carpets, staircases, armchairs – grow, shimmer and shift to become strange and uncanny. Lacquered floors stretch infinitely, recalling surrealist long horizons; household monstera take on artificial luminescence; the features of cryptic figures warp and distort, drenched in unnaturally vibrant hues. Exploring memory, transformation and psychological states, Pippa’s work creates tensions between the familiar and the fantastical, the harmonious and the discordant, the real and the imagined. 

In his 1957 text, 'The Poetics of Space', French literary theorist Gaston Bachelard explores the ways in which lived experiences of space supersede geometrical nodes, tracing the myriad, sprawling ways in which our surroundings augment the imagination.

Speaking of childhood environments, Bachelard describes how the childhood home is ‘our first universe’, a ‘cosmos’ or prism which provides an originary frame of reference through which all subsequent habitats are navigated. (1) 

Similarly, in Pippa’s practice, the artist suggests the primacy of the psychological over the architectural, creating complex, psychogeographic compositions which distend and distort spaces under the weight of nostalgia, anxiety and dreams. 

In ‘Power Shower’, Pippa implies a bathroom scene. Mundane motifs proliferate: a standing bathtub overflowing with puddled water, a chair adorned with towels and translucent shower curtains dividing the composition.

Concurrent, however, is an overt voyeurism, with twisted, spectral, carnival figures populating the space: one hovering behind a translucent divider, another bending like silly string around a rail. The claws of the standing bathtub refract, as toes, fingers and paws pepper the canvas at its edges, complicating the orientation of the scene before us. It feels as though the idea of a bathroom has been swallowed and regurgitated, creating an unsettling tableau of a space whose familiar contours are warped, as though re-remembered in a nightmare.

The fellowship has supercharged these considerations of the domestic into new, fantastical realms. The painting ‘Flux’ is meaningfully the first Pippa started whilst doing the fellowship, and for the artist, ‘the beginning of a new chapter’.

To the left of the work, motifs of a living room are loosely discernible: a brown leather sofa, chequered monochrome floors and a spidery candelabra casting yellow warmth. At the painting’s centre, however, cascading curtains divide the domestic and the mythic. Fantastical, electric green palm trees populate the painting’s outer vortices; stars twinkle aloft, and as the viewer’s eye reads the painting from left to right, the work distorts, warping objects beyond discernibility.

Pippa describes these psycho-spaces as, "Nostalgic, confusing and unobtainable because they exist as many things, in many moments and over expanses of time all at once, and physically not at all."  

Much as dreams introduce unexpected patterns of relation, ‘Flux’ distorts the known to create new syntactic cosmos. 

The Noble Approach 

Pippa tells me something she’s been thinking about. Apparently, it is impossible to ever imagine new faces; characters in dreams are simply amalgams of friends, relatives and strangers that the brain condenses into ‘new’ faces: "I can’t tell if this fills me with existential dread or if I find it wonderfully and strangely nostalgic."

The artist’s simultaneous anxiety and wonderment at this idea reveals complex questions about novelty, the composite and the limits of the imagination in her work.  

Pippa’s paintings often introduce a gentle disorientation in the viewer, with saccharine colour palettes masking disjointed angles, layered synchronic perspectives and shadows cast in impossible, unexpected formations.

In ‘The Fly’, dissonant patches of colour and dry staccato brushstrokes replete across a large patchworked canvas. Unrecognisable motifs accelerate, kaleidoscopically, giving the effect of stop-motion animation. At its centre is a lightbulb on its side; at the bottom (or is it the top?) peaked mountain-tops refract. Operating through all 360 degrees the work charts the swirling perspective of a fly zipping around a room, set into motion by the painting’s titular dismissal.

The work is not only spatially dissonant but conceptually too. With ritual heterogeneity, Pippa cites influences as broad as ‘The Book of Miracles’, a sixteenth century German manuscript of supernatural phenomena, to the stylised illustrations of 1960s. (2)

Much like the perpetual zipping of the fly, the painting refuses to lend viewers an easy landing to settle. 

Pippa’s work makes latent reference to the logic of animation, with its use of a hyperbolic and cartoon-like physics stretching the limits of the real, and where outmoded production techniques create uncanny disjoints between backdrop and foreground.

In a discussion on the artist’s perspective, Pippa references Disney multi-plane cameras – a mid-century technique which piled intricate illustrations atop one another to give the illusion of motion zoom, yet conversely maintained a strange stillness – and the work of American animation production designer Maurice Noble, whose colourful and fantastical illustrations populate the backgrounds of canonical cartoons. 

Studied independently, Noble’s fantastical horizons and bold but limited palettes create expectant backdrops, awaiting population. The works Pippa has created during the fellowship similarly gently move away from the figure, creating a pregnant sense of expectancy, capitalising on the disjunct between scene and action.

Much as cartoons trace adult emotions in childish sensibilities (the Roadrunner being a symbol for ever-deferred desire; the death-drive of Tom and Jerry’s perpetual antagonism), the perpetual zipping of the fly implies a chronic placelessness, a lingering ambiguity and a limitless imagination.  

Taking on the symbiotic role of painter and teacher during the fellowship has further concentrated the transformative element of Pippa’s artistic practice. The sensations of relocating, teaching, talking, building new studios and seeing multiple ways of working shaped the direction of the artist’s work.

Whilst the composite nature of ‘The Fly’ is reminiscent of the spatial enquiries of early twentieth century artists – Picasso’s cubist compositions, the gentle modernism of Cézanne – and also the playful hyperbole of cartoons, the nostalgia of video game aesthetics and even the twisting of recent AI visuals, the work’s contours seem principally informed by the new sensations of being at Manchester School of Art. Pippa foregrounds paint as a crucible which alloys imaginative, emotional and conceptual registers. 

A World Inside Out 

Amongst the half-formed paintings adorning Pippa’s studio, I noticed the repeated motif of the circus tent, alongside suggestive doors, windows and curtains, all of which have come to present symbolic thresholds in her practice.

In one work, painted with soft, undulating pastels, the negative space of the tent acts as a window through which a leafy, mythical tableau is framed. Hazy and sun-kissed, Pippa’s brushwork lends the effect of sunlight glinting on a camera lens, introducing a simultaneous nostalgia and the anticipation of a dream.  

In Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the carnivalesque, the Russian philosopher describes the mediaeval carnival as an anthropological phenomenon within which boundaries are ritually transgressed, within legitimised frames. Here, the hierarchic differences of class and power are suspended, allowing for new spatial and political power structures to proliferate. The carnival, ‘ … builds its own world in opposition to the official world’, allowing for renewal, revival and a ‘world inside out’. (3) 

Much as the fellowship allowed Pippa to experiment, pause and reflect in her teachings, Pippa’s new works centre the imaginative potential of ambiguity. Like Bakhtin’s carnival, her time at Manchester provided a sanctioned space within which the artist interrogated new possibilities of paint, turning the domestic ‘inside out’, and exploring thoughtful and studied, painterly pandemoniums. 

As Pippa continues to explore new directions in her work, augmented by the fellowship, these thresholds take on new meaning. 

1.  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [La poétique de l'espace], Beacon Press, 1994 [1958], p.4. 

2.  Joshua P. Waterman and Till-Holger Borchert, The Book of Miracles, Taschen, 2017 [2013]. 

3.  Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World [Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable], Indiana University Press, 1984 [1965], p.88. 

Pippa El-Kadhi Brown’s paintings are plucked from an array of sensations and memories which entwine and collide together. In these re-imaginings, the familiar gives way to the fantastical, and there is an urgency; a restlessness to capture the moment in this state of flux, before it flutters away.  

Lydia Earthy is a writer, editor and researcher based in London.  

Launched in 2021, the Freelands Studio Fellowship takes place annually to connect six artists with partnered UK host universities. The programme aims to foster a symbiotic relationship between teaching and artistic practice to enrich both artists’ and students’ work, facilitated by the environment of the artist studio and within the specific context of an art school. The 2024 Fellowship concluded with a group exhibition titled 'Enfold, Unfurl’, held in March 2025.