Corridor8 published Laura Biddle's review of Stranger Skies, Pippa El-Kadhi Brown's exhibition at the Holden Gallery, Manchester School of Art, running from 31 January to 27 February 2025. The show gathered twenty-nine new paintings made during her twelve-month Freelands Studio Fellowship.
Biddle described a body of work drawing on animation, nature, sixteenth-century manuscripts, personal memory and 1990s ephemera, with paintings including Aquaria, Phoenix Feathers, Tall Grass Whistles, Nightshade, Flux, Acatenango, Monkberry Moon Delight, Magnets to Dreams, Flesh of the Forest, The Fly, Sweet Musca, Stranger Skies and Power Shower, all dated 2024. The review set out El-Kadhi Brown's process of starting canvases horizontally in thin paint, letting marks suggest forms before turning the canvas upright, then working from multiple angles with charcoal, iridescent chalks and oil pastels.
The piece noted the artist's deliberate refusal to caption individual works, leaving viewers to read the blurred human and alien, real and imagined figures on their own terms. Pippa El-Kadhi Brown's fellowship year, surveyed here in detail, extends the same painterly instinct she brings to the exhibitions she makes with Tabari Artspace.
