Susan Adams / Zena Blackwell / Charlotte Brisland
Safe as Milk
07/08/2026 – 19/09/2026
Preview: Friday 7th August 7pm
When Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band used the adage “Safe as Milk” for their debut album, the concept was heavily laced with irony: milk is pure, it comes from the breast… but maybe not with all the chemicals Mother is imbibing? Artists Susan Adams, Zena Blackwell and Charlotte Brisland are asking questions too, is the home always a protected haven which shuts out the monsters, or are its very walls permeated with the uncanny which have created the alien within?
Safe as milk represents the work of Susan Adams, Zena Blackwell and Charlotte Brisland who explore the domestic sphere from three distinct angles. A familiar space which is often built around an interior location within which the drama of life unfolds in a kaleidoscope of the human condition. The paintings and sculptures in the exhibition explore and inhabit the shadows, crawl beneath the kitchen table, picture the inhabitants or hover at a distance. These views, transcribed from the female gaze and very much integrated within the female condition veer between the uncomfortable and the contemplative.
About the artists:
Susan Adams works across media including painting, woodcarving, animation and print, delving into narratives and situations that construct imaginative landscapes always finding their roots in reality. Drawn to the uncanny, Adams makes use of folk art, literature, film and children’s book illustration to look at the exchange between the solidly real and invisible worlds entered through belief and the imagination. Formative work researching medieval saints later developed into a dialogue with present-day voice-hearers. Her recent collaborative project A Private Land creatively explored the ruined Mid-Wales Hospital, formerly Brecon and Radnor Asylum.
For Safe as Milk Adams draws on the domestic space, re-animating found furniture and highlighting the animistic quality of objects contained within. She says: “Furniture is a literal part of the interior life of the building, while also capturing the imaginative scrutiny of children wherein furniture can become a whole landscape. Spoiled or fragmented furniture may tell other stories, of the home being a place of disquiet or violence”.
Narratives and characters are pulled from a creative correspondence with author Jo Mazelis, brought to life in drawers and cupboards; while ‘wallpaper’ drawings express the frustrated playing out of emotions within the home. The stall of openings and closings features a canopy of painted handkerchieves that once belonged to Adams’ mother and grandmother. Inspired by colourful food stalls during a recent residency in Japan, Adams says she “would like the stall to feel like it sits between worlds, part of a rite of passage”.
After studying Painting at the Slade and Electronic Art at Middlesex University, Susan Adams became Fine Art Fellow at Cheltenham College of Art. She worked as Artist in Residence in India, Japan, USA and UK including at ArtsAcre Calcutta, Millay Colony New York, WNO, Ynys Enlli, Oriel Mostyn and Gloucester Cathedral. Twice a recipient of a Creative Wales Award, Adams exhibits in the UK and internationally. She has lectured widely and now works in her studio in Mid Wales.
Zena Blackwell’s paintings explore the psychological landscape of adolescence, memory and family life. Formative dynamics of youth, identity and belonging are rendered with a sharp emotional charge that lingers between the familiar and the unsettling. Parental anxiety permeates the work, with worries about climate change, junk food, screen time and the general state of the world simmering subconsciously in the background. Blackwell’s paintings move between the surreal and the whimsical; becoming settings where psychological textures and nostalgia curdle into something more complex. She stages figures within domestic interiors with the outside often seeping in and carrying an atmosphere of stillness and latent tension. Fish and birds and other animals sometimes co-inhabit these spaces, creating the weight of what cannot be said. The paintings ask what it means to love someone you cannot fully protect.
Zena Blackwell is a British figurative painter based in Cardiff. Blackwell holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins and a BA from Wimbledon School of Art, and most recently completed the Turps Correspondence Course. Her work has been shown at Saatchi Gallery and Hastings Contemporary, among other institutions, and is held in the permanent collection of the National Library of Wales as well as in private collections internationally, including by an Art News top 200 collector. She has been shortlisted twice for the BEEP Painting Prize, winning the Friends of the Glynn Vivian Prize in 2024, and has received awards including first prize at Cardiff MADE Summer Open and a shortlisting for the Royal Academy Summer Show.
Charlotte Brisland’s paintings play with a dark undercurrent beneath a surface which is colourful and appetising; making use of the aesthetic of painting to attract. The painting explores shadow and light on the perimeters of these ideas and the colours meander around bright, poppy fluorescents and primaries, accompanied by offbeat tertiaries to deliberately set a stage of familiar landscapes with an undercurrent of disturbance. The paintings look to leafy suburbs grown around the development of nuclear weapons, picture-postcard fields and hedgerow which disguise battle grounds, spaces of time travel and folkloric landscapes described through word of mouth and ancient matriarchal memory.
Charlotte Brisland is a British painter living and working in the UK. Brisland graduated from the Royal College of Art in painting and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art (Painting) at the School of Art at Aberystwyth University. She has exhibited internationally and her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions, including the Barbican Centre in London, 24 Stunden Neukolln in Berlin and Agora Gallery in New York. During this time, she has won several prizes, including the prestigious Jackson’s Painting Prize in 2018 and most recently the Beep Painting Prize, 2024. Charlotte Brisland is a core artist with Circle Contemporary and Irving Gallery and is represented by Candida Stevens gallery.
Charlotte Brisland and Susan Adams were the principal award winners at the Elysium Gallery-led BEEP Painting Biennial 2024, while Zena Blackwell received the Friends of the Glynn Vivian Award.
Founded in 2012, BEEP was established to bring a regular programme of ambitious contemporary painting exhibitions to Wales, showcasing some of the most exciting and significant work being produced today. The biennial seeks to present outstanding contemporary painting from across the world, celebrating excellence in concept, aesthetics, technique, and the innovative use of materials.
BEEP will return in 2027.
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