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.