Kira Somerset: Portfolio of Sculptural Painting & Architectural Installations
2025, installation, sculpted acrylic paint rocks, dollhouse, 110 × 90 × 125 cm
Sublime Womanhood is a sculptural installation series that explores the hidden abuse embedded within culturally idealised notions of femininity and domestic safety. At first glance, the pink fabric dollhouse tent suggests innocence, play, and stereotypical girlhood. But as the tent doors open to reveal sharp pink rocks tumbling out, the illusion shatters.
Inspired by Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13-year-old Somali girl who was gang-raped and then stoned to death for "adultery" in 2008. This piece remembers her, and speaks to the violence endured by girls punished for surviving.This work draws attention to the way such abuse is often buried beneath social norms, family structures, and state systems that fail to protect.
The title leverages the duality of the term “sublime”—aesthetic beauty mixed with overwhelming or terrifying force. Here, Sublime Womanhood reframes femininity as something not merely delicate, but vast, complex, and capable of containing both joy and trauma.
This work challenges the viewer to confront the contradictions of womanhood: how softness can coexist with sharpness, and how safety can be a constructed illusion.
Sublime Womanhood
Sublime Womanhood III
2025, installation, sculpted acrylic paint rocks, glitter, dollhouse, 306 × 200 × 200cm
Inspired by Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13-year-old Somali girl who was gang-raped and then stoned to death for "adultery" in 2008. This piece remembers her, and speaks to the abuse endured by girls punished for surviving.
80’s Baby
150 × 330 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2024
Painted on unstretched canvas to accommodate its monumental scale, the piece is a raw and unfiltered exploration of form, colour, and texture.
The mark-making is complex and ever-shifting—no two areas are alike, inviting the viewer to lose themselves in the work’s layered intricacy. An unexpected pastel drawing cuts across the canvas like a lifeline—risky, spontaneous, and ultimately transformative. What began as a private act of catharsis has become the artist’s most cherished piece to date.
The Males Are Lonely
Sculptural installation, acrylic paint skins, glitter, 2025
The Males Are Lonely confronts the entanglement of male loneliness and male violence, and the cultural silence that allows both to persist. Constructed from pink acrylic paint skins, dried pliable surfaces peeled and moulded into guns, cameras, and hearts. These forms are coated in glitter, parodying innocence while echoing control, harm, and hollow intimacy.
The unblinking cameras evoke not just surveillance, but the digital gaze of parasocial relationships, where attention becomes a weapon and boundaries dissolve into coercive control. The depiction of hollow hearts highlights the emotional superficiality that often characterises male friendships.
Draped over a large freestanding plinth like a shroud or domestic textile, the work invokes the quiet, often invisible labor of emotional repair, work disproportionately shouldered by women.
It hangs a final tassel, embroidered in baby blue with the phrase: "Entirely unsubstantiated and strongly denied." This phrase crystallises the polished denial that masks male violence and emotional manipulation. Fragile yet glossy, the piece speaks to urgent, ongoing conversations around masculinity. emotional isolation, and violence.
Karmic
5 × 21 ft, Sculptural Installation, acrylic paint, glitter, sequins, 2016
This expansive work is composed entirely of hand-manipulated acrylic paint, embellished with glitter and sequins. Built through a process of layering, peeling, and reconfiguring dried paint, the piece occupies a space between painting and sculpture. The surface glimmers with reflected light, drawing attention to its tactile richness and the tension between fragility and flamboyance.
The materials—traditionally decorative—are recontextualized here as structural elements. The work invites close inspection, revealing fine details that evoke both celebration and decay. It resists categorization, asserting itself as both image and object, surface and form.
Power Poses
135 × 237 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2024
Sublime Womanhood II
2025, installation, sculpted acrylic paint rocks, foil leaf, dollhouse, 120 × 105 × 128 cm
Inspired by Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13-year-old Somali girl who was gang-raped and then stoned to death for "adultery" in 2008. This piece remembers her, and speaks to the abuse endured by girls punished for surviving.
I Don’t Like Pink
220 × 190 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2023
Til’ It Works
178 × 117 cm, mixed media, thread on canvas, 2022
Spontaneity
100 × 100 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2023
PLEASE! I’M A STAR!
123 × 93 cm, mixed media on canvas, 2025
