About

Margot Blackk is a contemporary abstract artist based in London, UK.

My paintings explore how perception and identity are formed through accumulation, pressure, and encounter. Rather than translating personal experience into narrative, I work through colour, density, gesture, and surface disruption to construct pictorial fields where instability becomes materially present.

Working primarily with oil, I build layered surfaces in which opacity, weight, and movement register the effects of time, contact, and internal change. Each painting develops through a process of negotiation between control and accident, intention and material friction. Paint is not treated as a passive medium, but as an active force that shapes the work’s structure, atmosphere, and presence.

Displacement is central to my practice, not as a fixed biographical subject, but as an ongoing condition of becoming. It appears through shifts in surface, blockage, and pictorial tension, where the painting moves between exposure and concealment, control and refusal, formation and disturbance. These conditions are not resolved into symbols or narratives, but held within the material and spatial logic of the painting.

I understand painting not simply as an image, but as a form of becoming: something I make, yet cannot fully control, possess, or resolve. Even when the surface is opened, scratched, layered, or interrupted, it does not disclose what lies beneath. Instead, it deepens the work’s opacity, allowing the painting to remain partially withdrawn from any singular reading.

I consider each painting a site of resonance: an object that invites encounter while refusing closure. Its layers hold traces of adaptation, disturbance, and transformation, allowing meaning to emerge through looking rather than explanation.

My practice begins from displacement, but moves toward painting itself: its autonomy, opacity, and unstable becoming. It proposes painting as a condition of encounter, where identity is not represented as a stable subject, but remains open, unsettled, and continually shaped through material presence and perception.

Education

2025/2026 MA, Painting, Royal College of Art, London, UK

2024 (Honours) Bachelor of Fine Arts, Drawing & Painting, OCAD University, Toronto, On, Canada

Solo Exhibitions

2024 Please, Black!, Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto, On

2023 Adversity to Contemplation, Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto, On

Group Exhibitions

2023 “Iridescence”, Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto, On

2022 “Abstraction”, 100 McCaul st, Toronto, On