The edges of Pippa El-Kadhi Brown’s canvases have always delineated sites as much as situations. Increasingly, those scenes are shifting from uncanny domestic tableaux to hazier splicings; dreamscapes, emotional excavations. And while the spectral forms and presences that inhabited her earlier work have become less explicit in this series of new paintings made during recent stays in Nairobi, Kenya — a distinct sense of haunting remains.

She comes in waves, 2026, exemplifies El-Kadhi Brown’s new focus on material and its interaction with the subconscious. Divided vertically between two canvases, the diptych is likewise split laterally, its lower portion of blue intimating reflections of the shapes above it: Rorschach, butterfly, body of water.

Painted in Nairobi during the rainy season, the work embodies that climate’s duality – “wet and dry at once” in the artist’s words – contrasting the strikingly arid surface of the canvas with the watery elements depicted on it. Meanwhile, its flowing focal point could be a waterfall, or the mosquito net in the artist’s Nairobi room; angular lines to the right might be purely abstract, or perhaps they recall the front door of her London childhood home. Worked on simultaneously over the course of four months, that ambiguity is part of the series’ proposition – She comes in waves is a palimpsest of emotional resonances, their significance almost as obscure to the artist as her audience.

A constellation of smaller paintings extends El-Kadhi Brown’s investigation of scale and space. More abstract than the large works, that step away from figuration results in a pleasant confounding: as viewers, have we been pulled closer or pushed further away? Resembling microscope slides on one hand, galaxies on the other, these smaller pieces spring from the same improvisatory method of composition as their bigger counterparts, but are generally completed in one sitting. That singularity makes them both more intimate and more explicitly sublime, underscoring both their interiority and the radical indifference of an eternal, unfeeling universe; how’s that, for 15 x 20cm?

Completed during a residency at Palazzo Monti in Italy between El-Kadhi Brown’s Nairobi stints, Rainmaker, 2025, is among the series’ most explicitly figurative. Two smudgy presences seem to peer into a column-shaped force extending to the sky above – a tornado, a sheet of rain, divine intervention? Attended by a third figure, who seems to control the work’s central weather system, the trio is so hazy as to be dissolving. To paint something normally entails cementing it – not for El-Kadhi Brown, who sends her pigment sliding, images dwindling almost out of sight.

Metabolising both the Kenyan landscape and Italian frescos, the cosmological intensity of El-Kadhi Brown’s smaller canvases and the dreamy consequentiality of the diptych, Rainmaker represents a bridge between the two stylistic scales. What ritual, phenomenon, psychodrama, have we glimpsed? Whatever the answer, its melting, misty figures will be gone before we’ve time to investigate.

This series of works evoke the experience of waking from a dream, and feeling its vivid details trickle away in real time; signs with no signifiers, colours pulsing and fading at once. Combining vastness and minutiae, El-Kadhi Brown’s canvases contain more sights and sites than they can hold; comfortable with that inherent paradox, they invite their viewer to step off a somnambulant, stomach-lurching ledge: the kind that meets you on the brink of sleep.

Text by Emily Watkins, London 2026

Pippa El-Kadhi Brown She comes in waves and other works