I’m primarily a painter whose practice also includes collage, assemblage, and installation. My work explores life in flux—the tensions and preoccupations that shape contemporary life in all its bewitching and grubby everydayness. I am drawn to the aliveness of spaces: how they are used over time, the histories they hold, and the social, political, and ecological currents that run through them. These currents gather into densely populated paintings full of human figures, animals, wobbly architectures, and the ephemera of everyday life.
Many of my paintings begin with a recognisable type of space—market places, recreation grounds, and other shared environments shaped by layered social and political histories. These spatial archetypes provide a familiar framework within which bodies, histories, and environments can be reconfigured, complicating how the space is understood and used.
Queer, Othered, and creaturely narratives are woven into this process, emerging from my experiences and the communities I am part of. My work explores not only the instability of spaces and histories, but also of identity—how who we are shifts across time and context. I’m interested in making visible the queerness embedded in everyday life, and in unsettling how the body is seen: not as fixed or singular, but as entangled within a wider network of relationships and conditions.
When I begin a painting, I visit a site repeatedly—photographing, drawing, making notes, and gathering materials while spending time with the people and creatures that inhabit it. In the studio, I use collage to construct compositions from these fragments. Through layering, juxtaposition, and reconfiguration, I bring together multiple moments and perspectives, producing images that hold contradiction, awkwardness, and the complexity of lived experience.
I work primarily with acrylic on asymmetrically shaped wooden panels. The irregular forms mirror actions within the painting, echoing a sense of instability. These works are often accompanied by smaller painted objects, arranged around the central image as if falling, stretching, or spilling outward. By combining painting with wall painting, assemblage, and installation, I extend the works beyond their edges, allowing them to inhabit space in unexpected ways.
Some of my favourite things to paint: weeds growing from cracks, obscure glass, used chewing gum, birds and birds nesting, surprising solidarity, badges, thresholds, earnest graffiti, HRT ephemera, spoilt dogs, small lovingly made and entirely niche objects, BINS!, melted plastic, corn dollies, all kinds of decay.
Selected Press
Frieze review - Queer History According to Flo Brooks, Elizabeth Fullerton
Time Out - Review: Flo Brooks, Be Tru To Your Rec at Project Native Informant, London
Featured show - The Shock of the Now Issue 37, Hector Campbell
Awkward Spaces - an essay by Paul Clinton, Grand Parade Press, Brighton CCA
Hunger Magazine - Flo Brooks’ paintings playfully pick apart our “mindlessness under capitalism”
Artforum - Critics Pick Flo Brooks at Cubitt Gallery
Elephant - Flo Brooks Gives Visibility to Trans Experience in Playful Paintings
It’s Nice That - Flo Brooks' paintings of liminality are those "almost everyone can relate with"
