If Fuseli's incubus was in cahoots with Dadd's fairy feller, then the art of Helen Flockhart RSA would be their twenty-first-century consequence. Her meticulously embellished and highly stylised visual narratives rehearse the uncanny encounter and behave like puppet theatres in scale. She often conjures glowing retellings of ancient myths and historical majesties, from Hygieia (2025), the Greek goddess of healing with a serpent tattoo, to the flaming red tresses and porcelain complexion of Mary Queen of Scots.

This interest in revising classical tales and questioning historical royalty has become an artistic strategy for many Scottish woman artists in recent years, including Sam Ainsley and Rachel Maclean, reflecting a reclaiming of agency.

Flockhart is among the most persistent inheritors of surrealist 'dream pictures' working in Scotland today. Her technically accomplished oil paintings find their companion in the animated ceramics of English artist Kim L. Pace given their mutual interests in merry-making and the impish spirit of the grotesque as a visual tradition, what Frances S. Connelly terms 'the image at play' (2012).

Latin American woman artists are also cherished references of Flockhart, from the puckish sculptural caricatures of Ana Maria Pacheco to Frida Kahlo's self-reflections on hybridity, flora and fauna. Flockhart's Dwelling Place (c.1998) showcases Pacheco's chorus of moon-faced characters, while the little foetus in Self Portrait (1988) offers an umbilical link to Kahlo.

Flockhart has long been familiar with the soft sculptural somersaults of Dorothea Tanning but has come to her cabbage-headed figures independently of Leonora Carrington which strikes one as a spooky coincidence.

2025, oil on panel by Helen Flockhart (b.1963)

The following exchange unpacks Flockhart's art education, dollhouse grotesquerie and reading of ancestral myth.

Catriona McAra: I recently saw two of your paintings in the Royal Scottish Academy: In Elysian Fields (2025) and I was Chloris, who am now called Flora (2025) which reminded me of Rousseau and Botticelli. This feels rare for a contemporary painter. Can you tell me about your artistic practice and your career so far?

Helen Flockhart: Painting. It has evolved over the years. I started off painting landscapes in Jimmy Robertson's studio, a tutor from The Glasgow School of Art. I chose to go into his studio in my third year because it was mostly female and felt a less intimidating atmosphere. Sandy Moffat had a lot of political work going on in his studio: Ken Currie and Peter Howson were attached, my husband, Peter Thomson, was in that studio, and Malcolm Dickson.

I was retreating, after a difficult second year, and my work grew out of landscape and eventually became more figurative. There was quite a lot of grotesquerie in it. Looking back, a lot of surrealist elements. Gradually, I honed it so that it has become less loose, less about the mark-making and more about creating little worlds with quite an intense, jewel-like, concentrated quality to them.

Catriona: I'm curious about your relationship to mid-twentieth-century modernism. When did you first become aware of avant-garde art?

Helen: For a few years, I was in denial about being a surrealist. I really don't like Salvador Dalí although I quite like Max Ernst. I was also looking at James Ensor and Käthe Kollwitz at that time. Co Westerik, a Dutch artist, was someone I was looking at. I saw David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) when I was in the first year at art school – that had a big effect on me. There was nothing like it. I really like other things that Lynch did but that really stands out. Miserable but fascinating!

The first time I saw art that really moved me beyond rendering was when I went to see 'Women's Images of Men' in the Third Eye Centre... It was 1981, I was in my first year and saw Magdalena Abakanowicz and Ana Maria Pacheco. Those sculptors moved me more than anything. I don't think I understood the politics at the time but they resonated for me on a human level: the power some human beings have over other human beings who are either having to submit or supplicate to others who are taking pleasure in their powerlessness.

In 1983, Peter and I went to Paris for New Year and saw the Hans Bellmer exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. Something about that picked the hairs on the back of my neck. I think Louise Bourgeois might have had some work in Paris at that time? At Pompidou, I also saw Nikki de Saint Phalle with a big stuffed woman covered in little dollies!

I have to admit that I did 'steal' the dollies for something. There was a place in the Savoy Centre in Glasgow which used to sell dollhouse furniture, all those little plastic dollies! I loved that texture but I couldn't articulate then what it was that was connecting me. There was something about it that really stirred something in me. I thought 'oh, art can do this as well?' But it took me years to appreciate how I could incorporate those feelings into my own work.

And of course, all of us girls loved Frida Kahlo! I always feel I have to apologise for liking her because she has become so ubiquitously known. But she is so good and the work really connects and reverberates: all the biographical stuff, her story.

The one I really like is where she is being breastfed by her nurse [My Nurse and I, 1937] and you can see all those little milk ducts. There is something about the grey sky and the texture of the plants, a cactus with tendrils. The contrast and composition, everything about it is just perfect. I really responded to the surrealist elements. There was just something really electric about it – the directness.

Catriona: In a catalogue essay (2018), Louisa Elderton imagines a 'scarlet bloodline' between you and Mary Queen of Scots. Does your recurring figure with the red hair represent yourself?

Helen: Not really. It's a bit of a mischief. Obviously, there are greater oppressed people in the world than redheads, but, growing up, we were always picked on and called names, my sisters and I. Though I grew to appreciate it. I'm not sure if you have noticed but, in a lot of films, the red-haired person is the villain or the weak person, the fool. Look out for it.

And Menelaus, the most famous cuckold in the history of myth, is invariably a redhead. There are exceptions, of course. It would have been great to have had red hair in the 1950s, Rita Hayworth and Ginger Rogers, and during the Renaissance. But certainly, I've noticed redheads are often portrayed as pretty weak and foolish. So, it is a petulant form of defiance!

Catriona: Very Scottish too.

Helen: Well, that's what my people look like. A lot of my ancestors. It shouldn't really be surprising that my figures have red hair but people do tend to comment. I guess because there are fewer of us, it tends to be noticeable in my work.

Catriona: Going back to your figurative visual narratives, you've noted your alignment with Kahlo. The women of surrealism seem to have found common ground in the art of storytelling. I'm interested in how contemporary artists use that dynamic. But you also seem to have older touchstones in your work, such as mythological narratives?

Helen: I definitely do. I love work from way back in history: pre-Islamic cherubs, or Lamassu and ancient Greek and Roman vases, medieval, Dutch and Indonesian art. I read a lot of mythical retellings by female writers, so sometimes I get very engrossed.

I also read translations of some of the original classical myths like Ovid's Metamorphoses. I haven't read them cover to cover, I'm not a scholar, but the parts that I like. I did study classics for one year at high school in 1974. You got to choose either Latin or Classical Studies, and being lazy, I chose the stories! I must have absorbed quite a bit there as I really enjoyed that class. I'm reading about Helen of Troy at the moment, and I never tire of Clytemnestra getting her revenge. I've never actually painted her though, it doesn't always work that way.

A visual might occur from the text but it has to come naturally otherwise it is illustration. The text will often spark an idea. It's hard to explain how it happens: often when I am reading. I might come across a texture or juxtaposition that I find very pleasing, and I think I'd like to incorporate that. My last gallerist liked me to write an essay for each painting explaining it, but I think that can be a misdirective. Sometimes the work just evolves. There are points of origin, but they become something of their own.

Lilies that Fester Smell Stronger than Weeds

Catriona: Do you have an object-making facet to your practice?

Helen: Yes I do. There's a frame I made, covered in little dollies. That was 1985 for my postgraduate degree show. This painting's about seven feet tall. It's very grotesque but when I made it, I didn't think of it as grotesque. People thought it was a foetus but I just didn't think of it that way. It was based on an automatic drawing. There was another sculpture I made for my degree show, kind of arranged like a starlet with wigs and a motor so that her legs went up and down. I burned it afterwards in a bonfire but I wish I had kept it.

Catriona: Do we still need all-women projects in your opinion?

Helen: I wouldn't say we NEED them, a lot of women artists are doing OK. I wouldn't bristle at seeing one though! I would embrace it as an opportunity to see some really interesting work. Come to think of it, most of the artists from my former gallery are women – that would make a really great group show! But the fact that they are female is incidental, to me anyway.

In 1983, I co-organised an exhibition of women's art with Alison Stirling. We fly-posted a beautiful poster of Charles Rennie Mackintosh graffitied with breasts. (We went to the Mackintosh Society to ask permission to use the photograph. They refused as it would breach copyright but suggested we could do a faithful drawing of it). We did feel at that time that women's art was not valued as much.

In fact, Jimmy Robertson was heard saying women's art was all 'bums and tits'. I did have genitalia in my art at the time but so what? I mean, we see it throughout art history. To say it is 'women's art' is a bit erroneous.

Catriona McAra, art historian and curator

This content was funded by the PF Charitable Trust