Penelope Boyd

SURRENDER
Grainger Gallery 15 October 2026

This body of work centres around the goddess Artemis. She is a bold, multifaceted and
uncompromising deity who watches over the wilderness, young girls and animals, and above all, the hunt. These paintings are an embodiment of that spirit. They embrace femininity and power, strength and fragility. As so often happens, the subjects of my paintings help create the work itself. It is a conversation, rather than a fixed plan, that allows these young women to surface, often within an environment that is not always welcoming.

As ever, the subjects of my work are masked, and I enjoy the parallel of this fierce protection of
identity in Ovid’s retelling of the story of Artemis (as Diana, her Roman counterpart) and Actaeon. In this story, Artemis bathes with her nymphs in a sacred grotto, when the unfortunate Actaeon, a
hunter, comes across her with his hounds. His transgression, whether intended or not, leads to his downfall, as he is, with a magical splash, transformed into a stag and set upon by his loyal dogs. While Actaeon’s fate is brutal, the spirit of Artemis’ actions inspires these paintings.


Penelope Boyd (b. 1982) is a realist painter from Canberra, Australia. Adopting many of the traditional painting techniques of the Old Masters, she borrows from the vast catalogue of pre-industrial western art, particularly portraiture and depictions of the sublime, to create works that are both beautiful and unsettling.

In her latest series, masked female characters occupy vast, theatrical landscapes, familiar but detached from any particular place or time. Boyd’s youthful heroines are engaged with these wild, dreamlike settings, unlike the often one-dimensional depictions of women in art history. Their identities and intentions are deliberately obscured and known only to their animal companions.

Drawing on ideas of landscape as a pathway to the sublime, these vast, untamed settings present a perilous backdrop for these fragmented narratives to unfold, and invite the viewer to journey with them.