Mary Naylor b.2004 is a painter born in Norfolk working between London and South Lincolnshire. In 2025 Naylor graduated from UAL Camberwell College of Arts with BA Fine Art: Painting First Class Honours.

Naylor’s practice uses painting as a medium to explore change and transformation. Focusing on the shell in its broken form, connecting its shape to a body or the landscape. The paintings themselves are informed by myths and folklore with Ovid’s Metamorphoses combined with her own experiences of love and grief. Nature is engulfing and forms rhythms between itself and the human body or essence. These rhythms are able to compare cycles of loss and renewal within life to parts of nature, specifically the movement of tides which are constant and stable. Nature becomes connected to all cycles or experiences of our lives. In the paintings the broken shell acts as a vessel to embody these ideas, it becomes a representation of life as a circular system of change, decay and transformation. Through paint the shell is able to become a container of emotions until it becomes like an entity itself. When combined with thin layered paint staining calico or canvas, saturating the material like water, it accentuates a fluid movement of metamorphoses. As a natural object the shell is something that is both a representation of life and death, its form is consistent throughout nature and is something that can transform into a different vessel of life after its original death. Through paint it is significant that the shell moves beyond its aesthetics, to convey its relationship with life and death as an object, eternal entity or vessel.

For enquiries email mary@marynaylor.co.uk

@marynaylorart

Group Shows

2026

The Carved Body, SANKI Gallery, Edinburgh

2025

Recent Graduates Exhibition, Affordable Art Fair, London

Invented Memories, Regents Park Gallery, London

Fine Art: Painting Degree Show, Camberwell College of Arts, London

What Now?, Southwark Park Galleries, London

2024

Water, Oil, Honey, The Crypt Gallery, London

Coalesce, Copeland Gallery, London

Arranging a Window, 92 Degrees, Edinburgh

Angels With Your Body, Safehouse 1, London

2023

Norfolk Creative Arts Exhibition, Grimston, Norfolk

Before Now, After Then, Bargehouse Gallery, London

Awards

2025 Freelands Painting Prize Nominee

Press

Interview with Toria Eve for The Art Thread, Issue 5 Autumn 2025