Serena Holliday is a painter based in Hackney, currently on the Turps studio programme.

I work from interior and exterior space, domestic and architectural, and the conflict between the two. The paintings are built up in layers of oil and acrylic and then taken back, so the light comes from behind the paint rather than sitting on top of it. The rooms are not real places so much as psychological ones.

I use the grid, perspective and those spaces as a way of thinking about control, value and the construction of the self. The grid is a visual structure and an internal one: a way of measuring, holding and organising experience, but also something that can begin to limit how I move, or how I understand my own worth.

Perspective draws you forward, towards stairs, corridors and areas of thinning light. It is the wish to keep moving into the future while knowing that what comes next can never be fully seen.

The domestic interior holds memory, and the presence of everything that brought a person to this point. Because the layers stay visible, earlier marks sit beneath the present surface: perception building on itself, the way experience does.

The paintings sit between structure and uncertainty, asking what it means to build a life, to try to control it, and still leave room for the unknowable.