Moira Cameron: Daily

Vigo Gallery is pleased to announce DAILY, Moira Cameron’s second exhibition with the gallery, opening at Wellington Arch on 15 May 2026.

These new paintings extend Moira’s diaristic practice: a visual chronicle of lived experience, emotional states and fleeting impressions. Each work begins with an underdrawing, composed of feelings and quotations written beneath the surface, never visible to the viewer. Beginning with the literal form of a diary, she translates private notation into paint. An example of these preparatory sketches is presented in the exhibition vitrine.

At the centre of the exhibition are female protagonists drawn as much from the artist’s own life as from the history of painting. They emerge as reanimated presences and quasi self-portraits: women once seen, painted and defined by others, now returning with a renewed sense of agency. These works revisit histories of representation long shaped by male artists, recasting them through a contemporary female perspective and locating personal emotion within that wider tradition.

The process is instinctive and accumulative. Impressions from encounters, museum visits, fleeting observations and art historical references are gathered and reassembled into urgent, expressive faces. Echoes of the odalisque, the muse, the enigmatic sitter and Salome, the murderous beauty, appear throughout. Yet these figures resist containment, becoming at once femme fatale and witness, subject and storyteller.

Selection happens intuitively: something in a glance, a posture, a piece of jewellery, a colour. Such details enter the visual diary, cross paths, overlap and gradually evolve into forms that approach the artist’s own likeness. She describes this process as akin to a script in flux, with characters drifting between scenes like storylines in a long-running drama. One day’s encounter becomes the catalyst for the next entry. These figures are permitted to re-inhabit not only her world, but their own, enduring not as static icons but as living, feeling presences.

DAILY becomes a record of time marked through painting: each work faithful to the day in which it was made. There is no attempt to revise or resolve. Like a diary, each painting stands as an assertion of presence, and a testament to a life continuously observed and intensely felt.

Moira Cameron was born in London to a family of artists. Her father was the celebrated figurative sculptor Ronald Cameron, and her mother, Dorothy Cameron, was a sculptor in her own right. Cameron's practice explores female agency and artistic legacy, revisiting art historical works through a contemporary female lens.

After decades of collaborative work, first with her late partner, artist David Spiller (1942-2018), and later with their son, Xavier Baxter, Cameron has returned to her independent practice. Her bold, expressive mark-making becomes a gesture of feminine agency, dissolving traditional boundaries between artist and subject. She replaces passive observation with active authorship, subverting the male gaze in both content and form. Her work invites the viewer into the emotional and physical act of creation, where the historically objectified female body gives way to the body in action.

Cameron lives and works in London. She holds a BA (Fine Art) from Ravensbourne College of Art and an MFA from Chelsea College of Art. In July 2025, her figurative self-portrait, A Life Lived, won the National Portrait Gallery's Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award and the work is currently on display in the Laing Art Gallery.