After moving to Italy 20 years ago, Liselotte Watkins became increasingly drawn to the Italian edicola: small kiosks that sell a range of items, from art magazines and newspapers to train tickets and children’s toys. Although fading into obsolescence, Watkins became fascinated by these structures as compelling symbols of both high and low culture, serving the entire surrounding community. For her 2026 exhibition at Lyndsey Ingram, Watkins has created her own version of the edicola, reimagined in dusty pink, with each wall used to display her intimate canvas paintings.
Much like the multifunctional edicola, Watkins’ paintings bring together a range of cultural references spanning from the domestic to the intellectual, all informed by her inquisitive interactions with the physical world around her. Watkins treats her paintings as research projects, drawing on imagery pulled from varied sources that she continually revisits throughout the creative process. Often rendered from an aerial perspective, her paintings use a flattened plane in which each motif is carefully arranged, balancing decorative beauty with conceptual tension.
While her works draw on religious iconography, art history, poetry, and academic writing, they crucially resist a fixed interpretation. Instead, Watkins invites viewers to engage intuitively, allowing meaning to emerge through personal connections and curiosity.
Central to this body of work is Watkins’ consideration of the female experience and the shared realities of women throughout history. Inspiration initially derived from a recent fascination with female sainthood and its gendered representations in religious iconography. Through the inclusion of figures such as St Lucia and St Caterina, Watkins considers how these women were abstracted from their personal histories and transformed into visual tropes of femininity, beauty, holiness, and sacrifice. The paintings also engage with contemporary female icons, who have instead been canonised by modern media and visual culture. In MM, a black-and-white portrait recalling Marilyn Monroe further hints at the commodification of the female image, while examining how women are idealised and consumed as their individual stories are erased.
Among references to a range of artistic and intellectual figures, including Simone de Beauvoir, Fernando Botero, Pablo Picasso, Franz Anton Bustelli, and André Breton, are small glimpses of daily life. A distinct sense of interiority is subtly woven into Watkins’ paintings, as dining tables, shelves, books, and teacups come together to reflect a quiet world rooted in the domestic realm. Most strikingly, many of the compositions employ a dynamic checkered background reminiscent of the red plastic tablecloths used in households across Europe, rendered here in Watkins’ characteristic subdued colour palette. Through these small details, Watkins’ work is grounded in lived experience, as the familiar textures of daily life are transformed into accessible, nostalgic compositions.
Ultimately, Watkins’ edicola operates as a physical vessel for the canvases, while providing a powerful contextual lens through which the works are examined. Much like the women Watkins paints, her edicolaspeaks to ideas of pragmatism and consumerism, as she aims to resurrect its forgotten histories while resisting obvious sentimentality. In this third iteration of the structure, the edicola is more interactive than ever before, inviting viewers to step inside and engage with a curated selection of books and writings. Although drawing on the historical, Watkins’ work is firmly rooted in the present and functions as a democratic space to look, think, read, and discover.
