Daisy McMullan

Daisy McMullan is an artist who creates richly layered paintings that document the natural world. Inspired by magical realism and the ever-changing soul of the landscape, her work employs expressive colour and mark-making to craft otherworldly interpretations of everyday scenes. Her shimmering paintings capture the glimmers of hope and joy found in nature, for those willing to look closely enough.

Daisy’s paintings frequently feature the verges, lines, and paths that map out ways of navigating the world both physically and emotionally. These are places she walks regularly - overlooked, common spaces that belong to everyone and no one. They are small wildernesses, uncultivated and irregular, which Daisy transforms into imaginative compositions, with multiple layers of colour and glazes creating a sense of layered stories and narratives within these marginal spaces. Each painting is a meditation on an interaction with the natural world—a rewilding of the mind, self, and soul.

Daisy's work also references Dutch Golden Age still life and forest floor paintings, where life, death, and spirit are carefully balanced and observed in sharply contrasting tones. Her expressive mark-making draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, particularly the works of Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner. There is also a distinctive English folkloric quality to Daisy's paintings that resonates with the work of Albrecht Durer and Lucian Freud’s approach to painting plants.

Daisy trained as a fine artist at Wimbledon School of Art and Camberwell College of Arts, earning a BA (Hons) in Painting in 2007. She later pursued a Master’s in Curating at Chelsea College of Art and Design and was awarded a two-year Research Fellowship in 2012 at Chelsea Space, a public gallery at the College. Daisy currently works as an artist, educator, and curator.

Submitted by Cynthia Corbett Gallery