Issue 6, Profiles

Miranda Forrester

The Beauty of Being Human

Words EMILY MCDERMOTT

Photography OLIVIA LIFUNGULA

For London-based artist Miranda Forrester, creating art is not about aesthetically translating research or one specific idea. Rather, her process of drawing and painting is entirely intuitive as she focuses on capturing the people in front of her. She works from life, documenting what it means to be human and occupy a body through figurative paintings on hyper-smooth primed canvas and transparent PVC. More specifically, she portrays queer Black women, individually and together, at home and in other private spheres, but always with a sense of both strength and vulnerability. And always through a process and a perspective that can best be described as natural, fluid, imperfect, and authentic—or, in one word: organic.

“A lot of my practice feels very organic to me,” Forrester says during a video call in March. From the colors she uses to the composition of a painting, she lets herself follow her gut. “I don’t consciously think about a lot of my decision making,” she explains. “With colors as well, my process is very intuitive—I’m just in the flow, mixing colors as I go.” The colors she’s naturally drawn towards are themselves natural: she primarily uses, as she explains, “earthy colors,” colors that are “not obviously man-made.”

Since 2019, Forrester has used a palette of browns, blues, and greens to explore the queer Black female gaze, especially to rearticulate the language and history of life drawing through this specific lens. She paints nude women of color alone and with each other, often with plants surrounding them, creating an immediate sense of warmth. Her brushstrokes are visible, making the hand of the artist always present, and when she paints on PVC, the material itself can feel alive as it moves ever-so-slightly in response to the tailwind of a passerby.

In the past few years, Forrester’s presence in the art world has steadily risen, with her work included in exhibitions in cities spanning Lagos to London to St. Moritz, Switzerland. When I call, she’s on vacation in Lanzarote, the easternmost Canary Island. I apologize for interrupting her holiday, but she insists the timing is perfect: “My schedule is so busy when I get back, I thought it would be really nice to do this while I have some breathing time.”

Indeed, her growth isn’t slowing down anytime soon. When Forrester returns to South London, where both her home and studio are located, she’ll be preparing for a number of upcoming shows and finishing her largest body of work to date. Titled Arrival, the new suite of 15 paintings honors the birth of her child and, with it, the dawn of a new chapter in her life: parenthood.

“Initially, a lot of people asked when they would see paintings of the baby and I was like, ‘This isn’t going to change me, this isn’t going to change my work.’ I thought if I was going to make paintings of [my daughter], it would be for private use, not to go out into the world,” Forrester explains. “But then, well, yeah… I didn’t realize how much parenthood would change me and now I’ve made a whole series about her,” she continues, breaking into a smile and laughing. Beyond the obvious arrival of the baby, “for me, Arrival is also about the new person I am. It feels like a huge responsibility and there’s no turning back, but in the best way.”

Although I haven’t seen the pieces—she’s saving their debut for a solo show at her gallery Tiwani Contemporary in November. It is safe to say that the paintings will be full of the emotions that have defined Forrester’s work for the past four years: intimacy, honesty, and expressing what the male gaze cannot. But while Forrester now conveys such emotions through painting with as much force as a silent conversation in a dialogue-less scene of a film, it took her years of studying and experimentation to reach this point.