Diminutive and pearlescent, Carlile’s Portrait is the earliest work by a woman in the Government Art Collection. Carlile, one of the first professional female portraitists in England, likely painted it in the 1650s.

The sitter is not identified, however recent research suggests that she resembles Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart (1626–1698), who Carlile painted several times. Based at Ham House in Richmond, Murray was a loyal supporter of Charles I, and an astute political operator who in 1653, joined the Sealed Knot, a secret organisation established to restore him to the throne. After the Restoration, her loyalty was recognised with a pension of £800 a year for life. Murray remained a keen collector and patron of Carlile.

Visiting Egypt in winter 1979, Riley was struck by the set of colours she observed in the artefacts at the Cairo Museum and the tomb paintings at Luxor. She began painting with what she called an ‘Egyptian Palette’ of colours which allowed her to ‘recreate the colours from memory. Reflection is one of the first paintings I made with it.’

Riley’s practice has often been associated with ‘Op Art’. However, her exploration of perceptual principles to create optical effects is rooted closely to her belief that visual forms offer a medium through which to experience the intangible experience of emotion or mood. Playing with repetition, contrast, reversal and counterpoint creates visual ‘disturbances’ that offer sensory connections.

Popova’s chair honours the physicist Lise Meitner. Hahn, Strassmann and Meitner discovered the nuclear fission of uranium, a major development in nuclear energy. Invited to take part in the 1942 Manhattan Project, she declared ‘I will have nothing to do with the bomb!’. When Hahn and Strassman received the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Meitner was snubbed.

In 2017 at Girton College, Popova made a tapestry with designs echoing chemical elements, including plutonium, whose synthesis was a key outcome of the Manhattan Project. She used a version of the tapestry to upholster a chair from the College, dedicating it to Meitner who she visualised ‘sitting in the chair and taking a moment to reflect on her complex historical legacy'.

This work by Crewe, one of five fired clay slabs from Slabs by Radclyffe Hall (2020) which they made for two ‘sister’ exhibitions in Birmingham and Hull. It references Radclyffe Hall, the English lesbian writer, whose 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, has inspired generations of LGBTQIA+ readers.

Crewe’s video, “Morton” – “Beedles” – “An abyss” follows the re-enactment of the 19th century summer tradition of ‘well dressing’. Crewe describes, ‘...together, and apart, these slabs test the possibility of living with a wound. In all of them a chemical change had taken place, and had been an ordeal. Beautiful things were burnt up, and much was lost – but the objects have taken forms in which they might survive, changed.’

A European plug lying redundantly beside a British power socket, Sami’s painting has an air of wry humour, yet disguises his personal experience of pain and trauma. He describes this painting as one of ‘displacement, not fitting, and detachment from the perspective of a post-refugee artist.’

Born in Baghdad, Sami grew up in the shadow of seven wars in Iraq. He later studied at the Institute of Fine Art, Baghdad and worked at the Ministry of Culture, before eventually seeking asylum in Sweden in 2007. Reflecting the lived experience of post-traumatic stress disorder, the act of painting provides both a means for attempting to process suffering he has witnessed and what he vividly describes as ‘a burden of remembering.’