Esther Castle

Degree: BA (Hons) Painting
University: Edinburgh College of Art
Graduation Year: 2024

New Blood Art Commentary

New Blood Art emerging art prize winner, Esther Castle’s paintings are curious, sharp, and alive with invention. Surreal characters twist through thickets of colour and form - part body, part object, part story in motion. The work has humour, but it’s not light. There’s something else underneath: a feeling of being watched, misread, transformed.

They’re not wild - they’re wise. Peculiar, yes. Playful, yes. But rooted. What they carry is precise - something true about control, containment, resistance. Esther uses scale and surface to hold our gaze, but never neatly. There’s always a kind of blur. A tension that doesn’t settle. Something weirdly alive just below.

She’s not illustrating a narrative - she’s building a world. One where discomfort isn’t denied, but reimagined. Where oddness is generative. Where looking becomes part of the point.

Artist Statement

My Art Practice is a reflection on a past childhood illness and a process of ‘fictioning of reality’, where I create worlds where peculiar things can grow. I feel the need to reflect on this experience as a way of processing my own disability which I acquired due to my illness, as well as questioning what the ‘disabled’ body’s place in society is, but in a peculiar and explorative way. I view the figures as both survivors of an illness but also the illness itself, inspired by the way cancer cells were often described to me as unexplained, curious and unknown growths that took control.

Through investigating the garden space, I aim to draw comparisons with how non-normative bodies are unruly in similar ways to weeds, which are often extricated by ‘gardeners’ due to their ‘undesirable’ nature. I also aim to create ‘stage set’ spaces, where multiple paintings can interact with sculpture and installation, creating an ambiguous and layered world.