Born 1987, Exeter.
Lives and works in Cambridgeshire.
I'm primarily a painter, though my practice also includes collage, assemblage and installation. My work attempts to describe life in flux — to express the tensions and preoccupations that underpin contemporary life, in all its bewitching and grubby everydayness. I am drawn to the aliveness of spaces and how they are used, the social, political and ecological currents that run through them — creating worlds rich with the texture, sensation and feeling of everyday life.
I am queer and trans and surrounded by creatures, and all of these things filter into what I do. My work often engages with queer, Othered and creaturely narratives, finding ways to document LGBTQ+ community histories, memories, and our encounters with and in the natural world.
There is always a physical space in mind when I make work — I spend time in it, getting to know it: visiting, taking photographs, drawing, making notes, making objects, spending time with the people and creatures that occupy it. I gather these different strands and bring them back into the studio, using collage to build up a composition that the painting grows out of — absorbing new images and ideas as it develops.
My paintings are often densely layered, the collage process that underpins them lending the work a fragmentary and restless quality. I mainly work with acrylic on shaped wooden panels, but have also worked onto aluminium panel, and canvas appliquéd onto found fabric — materials and processes always chosen with the subject in mind.
Smaller painted elements can be arranged constellation-like on the wall around a central painting, figurative appendages and structural supports spurting out from the edges, the spaces, textures and materials of these worlds overflowing into wall painting, assemblages or larger sculptural installations.
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"