Kira Somerset: Portfolio of Sculptural Painting & Architectural Installations
Sublime Womanhood
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.
Blow
2025, 5 x 5 ft, Sculptural Installation, Acrylic paint, glitter
Built through a meticulous process of layering and pouring, the piece occupies the volatile space between fluid and solid.
The surface, a high-saturation palette of magenta and pink, glimmers with a deceptive, tactile richness, highlighting the tension between the fragility of the medium and the flamboyance of its presentation.
By recontextualizing decorative materials as heavy, structural forms.
Karmic
2016, 5 × 21 ft, Sculptural Installation, acrylic paint, glitter, sequins
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.
Glitter appears in the work as both a material and a visual language. Where it is used, it is glitter the artist already owned; using it within the work is a more responsible alternative to discarding it.
The glitter is sealed into the finished pieces, ensuring it is contained and stable as part of the work. Future pieces will be made using a biodegradable glitter alternative.
Lonely Hearts Club
2025, Sculpted acrylic paint skins and glitter on canvas, 117 × 178 cm
This monumental work takes its title from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—an iconic exploration of persona, costume, and the freedom found in adopting an alter-ego.
The large surface is consumed by hundreds of deep-pink, glittering hearts. While the color and overwhelming scale create an initial aesthetic of feminine abundance and sweetness, the hearts themselves are hollow.
Somerset uses this contrast to examine the cost of the outward performance of identity. The ritualistic process of sculpting these empty, glittering forms speaks to the immense effort required to curate and maintain a public self. The work asks: when we adopt a persona in order to be seen or to belong, is what remains at the core truly expressive, or merely a hollow, dazzling facade? This piece monumentalizes that complex, glittering labor.
PLEASE! I’M A STAR!
2025, Mixed media on canvas, 123 × 93 cm
A monumental figurative study that documents the transition from observation to self-proclamation. Spanning six years, this face is an accumulation of oil paint, oil pastels, and gold thread.
The hand-sewn crown of crosses acts as a literal and metaphorical intersection a point where religious iconography meets personal sovereignty. It is an exploration of 'Divine Worth'; the act of an artist crowning themselves when the world refuses to provide the ceremony.
The title, a reference to the film Pearl injects a sense of desperate, manic ambition and raw vulnerability into the work. This is mirrored by the stars, a deliberate nod to Hedy Lamarr, whose profound scientific intelligence was long overshadowed by the world’s fixation on her beauty. By weaving these elements together, the work reclaims the brilliance often buried beneath the surface of an image.
It is a loud, unapologetic celebration of resilience and the ritual of coming back to oneself.
80’s Baby
2024, Mixed media on canvas, 150 × 330 cm
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.
Ticket To Ride
2022, 5 x 2 ft, Sculptural Installation, Acrylic paint, glitter
Built through a meticulous process of layering and pouring, the piece occupies the volatile space between fluid and solid. The surface, a high-saturation palette of magenta and pink, glimmers with a deceptive, tactile richness, highlighting the tension between the fragility of the medium and the flamboyance of its presentation.
Power Poses
2024, Mixed media and thread on canvas 135 × 237 cm
Thousands of hand-sewn interventions across a landscape of accumulated paint. Power Poses is an exploration of "Self-Ascription"—the act of defining one's own value from within.
To champion oneself is an act of defiance. Here, the "Power Pose" isn't a temporary stance; it is a permanent, structural change.
Til’ It Works
2022, Mixed media and thread on canvas, 178 × 117 cm
The Males Are Lonely
2025, Sculptural installation: acrylic paint skins and glitter
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.
Sublime Womanhood II
Installation: sculpted acrylic paint rocks, glitter, and 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
2023, Mixed media on canvas, 220 × 190 cm
Spontaneity
2023, Mixed media on canvas, 100 × 100 cm
