Nell Brookfield’s paintings usually start with the people around her. Close family and friends are observed and reworked into scenes that borrow from myth, folklore and elements of the natural world. These arresting images are at once familiar and unsettling, offering up a kind of enhanced mirror that reflects not only what can be seen, but also the unseen, the unspoken, the repressed, the hidden. Reality, in other words, but not always as we see it; this is the reality that sits just beneath perceptual experience, that which pokes through in dreams and in visions. Brookfield often uses figures of animals as well as of humans, not least to emphasise the animal in all of us. Her tactile and textured practice pays particular attention to feathers, skin, fabric, and fur, using hand-mixed pigments.