Miranda Forrester is a figurative painter living and working in London. 

Since graduating from the University of Brighton with a BA in Fine Art Painting, her work has been featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, such as the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, Venice Biennale 2024 and Foundry Seoul. Her work is included in public and private collections, including The Government Art Collection, The Arts Council Collection and Soho House collection. 

Forrester explores the queer Black female gaze in painting, positioning it against the long history of men depicting women’s bodies. Her work confronts the persistent invisibility of Black women in the Western art historical canon, using painting as a site to re‑articulate the language of life drawing through a queer Black feminist and desiring lens. In doing so, she pictures what the male gaze has historically failed—or refused—to see.

Her use of polycarbonate sheeting and bespoke framing is fundamental to this reimagining. These translucent surfaces allow the viewer to see through and around the pictured bodies, dissolving the boundary between figure and ground. The surface becomes more than skin; it becomes a membrane through which the figures appear to move, breathe, and shift. This layering of transparent materials alludes to the complexities and nuances of womanhood, femininity, gender, and sexuality, while also embracing a deliberate ambiguity—inviting multiple readings rather than fixing the figures in place. 

Forrester draws on the visual language of Renaissance painting and the broader history of art, referencing its compositional rhythms and devotional stillness while radically reconfiguring who is allowed to occupy those spaces. Her figures move between moments of quiet solitude and vibrant group settings, exploring intimacy, gesture, and connection. In these scenes, Black women are pictured as the most expansive versions of themselves—unbounded, self‑possessed, and held within environments that honour their presence.

Exploring the significance of domestic and interior spaces for queer people, Forrester’s paintings capture insular moments of warmth, tenderness, and self‑reflection. Large expanses of emptiness are animated with fluid, assertive lines; bold figures occupy their space with authority yet subtlety, speaking to the strength found in vulnerability. Lines and translucent brushstrokes roam across the surface, often spilling beyond the stretcher onto the wall, gathering shifting observations about the nature of identity and embodiment.

Altogether, the work is a celebration of Black women and non-binary people’s bodies, the joy of inhabiting feminine identities, and the power of being in relation with one another. 

Miranda Forrester is represented by Tiwani Contemporary.