October 2026

Ellis King

“Spilt Milk”

Ellis King (b. 1989) is a British figurative painter based in Norwich, UK. Her practice

uses the female figure to explore the quieter, psychological realities of private life that

are often absorbed, minimised or left unspoken.

Spilt Milk is a body of self-portraiture exploring the experiences women are often

encouraged to minimise, dismiss or simply move on from. The title comes from the

familiar expression “don’t cry over spilt milk”, reflecting a wider instinct to carry on,

keep going and not dwell too long on what has happened.

King is interested in what this leaves behind. The work considers the physical and

emotional realities women are expected to navigate, from pregnancy and motherhood

to rejection, failure, disappointment and loss, and the difficulty we can have as a

society in making space for difficult emotions. What happens to those feelings when

there is little room for them elsewhere?

Home becomes the place where this private weight is carried. Bathrooms, bedrooms

and kitchens appear throughout the exhibition as familiar spaces that can also feel

isolating. The single figure is often caught alone with what cannot be expressed or

contained in public, creating a tension between the familiarity of home and the

vulnerability it can hold.

Working in oil and acrylic, King brings the literal and the semi-imagined together,

holding two realities at once: a woman fully present in a room, and somewhere else

entirely.

“These paintings are about those emotions which seem most difficult

for us to talk about or acknowledge, such as shame, failure, pity and

anger, and what carrying those emotions in our most private

environments looks like. Whether that’s mental load, trauma or

something physical, I’ve become interested in thinking about how

‘home’ is a place that encapsulates all of this.”

— Ellis King

Biography & Credits

King appeared on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year in 2025 and was selected for

the ING Discerning Eye at Mall Galleries, London. In 2024, she was named one of

100 Emerging Artists by the Arts to Hearts Project. Spilt Milk is the result of the SQFT

Gallery Exhibition Prize, awarded at the 2025 Women in Art Prize.