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 explores change and transformation. Focusing on the shell in its broken form connecting its shape and presence to a body or the landscape. The paintings themselves are informed by myths and folklore within writings such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses combined with her own experiences of love and grief. The rhythms and connections between nature and human body or essence has always been the source of interest. As nature has always been an ever presence in her life, it is something that is engulfing and that is 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 into canvas or calico it accentuates a fluidity and ambiguity that accentuates the movement of metamorphosis. 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 even 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
2025 Recent Graduates Exhibition, Affordable Art Fair, London
2025 Invented Memories, Regents Park Gallery, London
2025 Fine Art: Painting Degree Show, Camberwell College of Arts, London
2025 What Now?, Southwark Park Galleries, London
2024 Water, Oil, Honey, The Crypt Gallery, London
2024 Coalesce, Copeland Gallery, London
2024 Arranging a Window, 92 Degrees, Edinburgh
2024 Angels With Your Body, Safehouse 1, London
2023 Norfolk Creative Arts Exhibition, Grimston, Norfolk
2023 Before Now, After Then, Bargehouse Gallery, London
Awards
2025 Freelands Painting Prize Nominee