Inner spaces

^{Main image: photograph of Frances Featherstone in her studio by John Knight.}

2025 was a huge year for Frances Featherstone.  

Not only were two of her works selected for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition (from a pool of over 18,000 entries), but she was also awarded the Academy’s Maire Ragnhild Hollingsworth Prize for Oil Painting for her submission Motherly Loves. 

And those achievements were just the icing on the cake in a year marked by numerous other accolades and exhibitions, including a solo show at the Fairfax Gallery (Tunbridge Wells) which sold out in just 30 minutes. So it feels very apt that, on the day Featherstone joins me, smiling, for an interview from her studio (a remodelled Victorian stables in East Sussex), the sun is shining through the windows as she comes online. 

Looking at Featherstone’s paintings, it’s easy to understand why they are so popular, inspiring levels of excitement and devotion not generally directed at oil painters on this side of the 19th century. Her technique is flawless and immediately, viscerally engaging; she paints with a quiet authority that is perhaps not surprising from an artist who was gifted her first set of oil paints at age seven and won an art scholarship to secondary boarding school just a few years later.  

And, while the school didn’t work out, when it came to her art, Featherstone never gave up. She continued to hone her skills throughout her secondary education and later at the University of the West of England, where she pursued a BA in fine art and visual culture – even though, she says, oil painting had fallen out of fashion by the time she matriculated.

“I didn’t do straight fine art because I thought, oh my goodness, I don’t know how I’m going to make a job doing this… and painting wasn’t fashionable in that day and age; you didn’t see it at art college. It was more video installation and conceptual art.” 

I’m trying to give the message that solitude is actually a gift. It’s not about loneliness. It’s an active choice to withdraw, to pause… and give yourself time to reflect, dream, be bored.

Following an MA in interactive multimedia, Featherstone embarked on a career as a designer, eventually landing at the BBC in the early 2000s, a time when its website was, as she says, a “huge beast” requiring a relentless diet of design updates. But she never stopped painting, and after almost a decade of helping to shepherd the BBC’s site through a period of intense and exciting change, in 2008 she left to pursue her art full time. 

Featherstone’s two toddlers served as natural (and convenient!) subjects as she re-immersed herself in her painting. Her sensitive portraits of them were soon noticed, leading to commissions and further work, which she was increasingly able to take on as her children grew. It’s hard not to see a direct through-line from these earlier portraits, in which the children appear serene, connected to interior worlds of their own, to Featherstone’s most recent series From the Perspective of the Angels, paintings from which will be included in an upcoming viewing at RSA House on 7 May.

This series comprises Featherstone’s vibrant, languid portraits of women of all ages painted ‘from above’ in domestic spaces, primarily beds. Here, the settings are rendered in precise detail, in complementary patterns and colours that would make an interior designer swoon.  

And, within these pleasing, profoundly feminine retreats, Featherstone’s women exist freely and unapologetically: they read, they daydream, they snuggle cosily with a pet or engage in a spot of needlework. While the dominant emotions in the paintings are of peacefulness and solitude, the images don’t feel lonely. There is the sense that each of these women is in some way being nourished by that solitude, even in those images where the model appears to be hiding, retreating or nursing an inner struggle. 

The ‘angel’s eye view’ brings an intimacy to these works that another perspective might not, Featherstone points out. “You can’t really see the features of the model, so it draws you in much more – it becomes more a feeling. And so you can imagine yourself, or someone else, in that situation. I think that also helps to make it look a bit more intimate.” The perspective also feels critical to how Featherstone makes the women’s spaces feel protected, and the models themselves cherished and safe within them. 

It’s notable that, although one might certainly expect some of the models to be looking at a phone or tablet in bed, there’s not a screen in sight across the series. All the women are engaged in purely analogue pursuits, and this is intentional, says Featherstone.  

Referencing two of her more recent works – the first showing one of her teenage daughters with a record player, another an older woman with an old-fashioned dial phone, she says “I like the idea that we’re pausing from this digital world where everything’s virtual. I’m bringing us back to a sort of simplicity, to simple objects.” A key aspect of the series, she points out, “is the idea that home is a feeling of comfort and security and an escape from this high-paced, digital world.

“I think there are huge demands on children and the younger generations,” she says thoughtfully. “There’s so much going on. I’m trying to give the message that solitude is actually a gift. It’s not about loneliness. I think it’s very different. It’s an active choice to with-draw, to pause and it’s okay and actually very important to take a step back and give yourself time to reflect, dream, be bored.” 

Her message has certainly resonated. Across generations and communities, Featherstone receives communications from wildly diverse subsets. To call out just a few: people who have problems with insomnia (for whom, Featherstone says, the bed can be “almost a torment”, but who “find it really therapeutic to see it as a beautiful place, and to accept it”); GCSE students who are drawn to her representations of young people and want to use her as their “contemporary artist”; lovers of reading (including some very well-known authors); and groups of quilt makers, interior designers and “people who are just really into textiles”.  

For that last group, the Angels series offers a true feast for the eyes and the mind, and spotlights Featherstone’s design chops to boot. The paintings teem with colour, drawing the eye to the interplay of patterns between the bedding and (often) tiles, and how these interact with the models themselves and the objects they engage with. There’s a jewel-like quality to these portraits, and this in turn sparks a feeling of deep collectability. You want to own them all. And that may be one of Featherstone’s greatest gifts – having succeeded in her mission to “make the ordinary extraordinary”. 

When asked if her own domestic space resembles those in the series, Featherstone laughs and shakes her head. Though her mother, she says, was a “quite brave” interior designer who “painted different rooms with different intense colours and had a lot of pattern going on”, her own walls are white – she likes to fill them with paintings and prints. Those early rooms though, she reflects, “resonated with me somehow and have come back in a different form.” 

Featherstone plans to keep working on the Angels series, as there are so many more settings and scenarios she wants to explore. And she is optimistic about the artist’s role in society, in spite of the challenges of modern-day life, noting that social media, for all its downsides, has played an important role in growing artistic communities and providing chances to both connect with other artists and to get one’s art seen.  

“I think it’s a great, great time to be an artist, really. There are a lot of opportunities if you want them. I know there’s a lot of competition, too, but there are still so many ways you can get your art out there.” 

As for her own paintings, Featherstone says, once they go out into the world, “What I love is the fact that they’re not my paintings anymore. They’re kind of everyone else’s to make what they want with them, or what they want to read into them. 

 “And there couldn’t be anything better for an artist, really.”