In The Studio with Mia Wilkinson
Upcoming Artist in Residence
Mia Wilkinson is a UK-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice interrogates Western constructions of the domestic female through painting, drawing, collage and rapidly produced sculptural forms. Rooted in a working-class upbringing in the North East and shaped by a complex matriarchy alongside the absence of her Asian father, her work explores gendered performance, racial fragmentation, social visibility and bodily power. Through thick impasto, fractured pattern, repetition and collision, she constructs psychologically compressed interior spaces where grotesque, bawdy bodies disrupt inherited artistic and cultural hierarchies.
During her residency Mia will treat the hotel as a site of temporary domesticity and a place of service, anonymity, confession, and ritual. In the heart of East London, where private lives and public performance constantly collide, she will develop a new body of paintings, drawings, and sculptural forms that respond to the hotel as both shelter and stage.
At the centre of the project sits a participatory work titled “What do you think this is a hotel?” Guests will be invited to draw, mould, and build a communal table through clay and mark-making workshops. The table becomes an archive of touch, conversation, memory, and psychological residue gathered from the experience of staying, serving, resting, and passing through. The work culminates in a final performative moment, “The guests are served,” collapsing the roles of host and guest, labour and spectacle, care and consumption.
Throughout the residency, the space will be activated through talks, shared meals—both metaphorically and literally—and collaborative workshops with East London artists and communities, embedding the neighbourhood’s voices and gestures into the work itself.
