The mid-fifteenth century Italian artists Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca were often referred to as the “painters of light” due to their contrasting use of light and shadow to bestow a holy aura on objects and figures. In Fra Angelico’s famous Annunciation painted for the Convent of San Domenico in Fiesole (ca.1425–1426), Christ’s incarnation in the Virgin’s womb is indicated by a penetrating golden shaft of sunlight that diagonally slices through the painting straight from the glowing orb of the sun which contains the hands of God. The reference is clear: sunlight indicates that which is sacred.

The depiction of sunlight to reference the divine can be seen throughout the long history of painting. Katherine Perrins channels this tradition to sumptuous and focused effect in her still life paintings where sunlight illuminates everyday, mundane scenes relating to the invisible labours of childcare. In doing so, much like Christ’s immaculate conception, Perrins invites us to consider and revere that which often goes unseen.

Perrins’ paintings from 2017 to 2024 depict closely observed interior domestic spaces of her own home. Poignant works from 2020, made while rearing her young children during the ‘lockdowns’ of COVID-19 are tightly cropped compositions that fixate on static domestic objects including a toy pram, the dishwasher, and a doormat. Observed from a low vantage point – perhaps that of a young child or the mother herself (so often bending down) – these items infer thresholds and the in-between states of transition. The abandoned pram by the closed stairgate indicates a recently playing child; clean dishes await the noisy business of being put away (or simply re-used) in the Sisyphean task of cooking-eating-clearing up; and a disturbed doormat rests in anticipation of the next coming or going.

As scenes entirely devoid of figures, Perrins’ work clearly references the genre of the still life, yet the term ‘still’ starts to unravel as her works hum with a sense of imminent change and the presence of shifting maternal subjectivities. We bear witness to these fleeting moments of domestic inactivity – a sensation many parents will recognise as uncanny and unstable. To call them ‘still’ is to perhaps indulge with the artist in a fantasy of prolonged silence and solitude, all the while knowing this imagined calm is on the edge of collapse.

Perrins’ other paintings continue in this way. We see the sunlit surfaces of drying laundry, stacked tupperware, drying baby bottles, and even unravelling toilet paper -each given the same painstakingly but tenderly observed painterly treatment. There is a palpable domestic duality at play: of both the familiar (and familial) as comforting but also a sense of a listless, contained boredom. As a series of artworks made over several years, Perrins perhaps suggests these two feelings are not so much in conflict but continue to be held in parallel.

More recent work has focused on another arena of care: the playground. Perrins has given outdoor play equipment from her local park the same scrutinised focus as previous still life works while arguably challenging herself with more complex objects and compositions. Slide (2026) takes on the tricky representation of direct sunlight on metal, while Totem (2025) depicts the sculptural rope form of a climbing frame and the effect of the (almost) mid-day sun which, like a sundial, casts a slightly off-centre shadow again indicating shifting temporalities and transitions between states of play, times of day, and the fluctuating maternal psyche.

In taking these autobiographical objects and scenes as her subject matter while refusing the inclusion of figures Perrins asks questions of the still life genre and cultural production more widely: Can the still life be a vehicle for representing maternal subjectivities? Can a mother’s everyday be sacred? And is what’s already sacred to a mother or a parent, a legitimate subject for culture? Of course, there is already a legacy of female painters who have depicted motherhood figuratively, from the nineteenth-century French artist Berthe Morisot and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American painter Mary Cassatt to contemporary painters such as Caroline Walker who depicts the broad communities who engage in childcare. While Perrins is clearly part of this thematic lineage and its reactivation today, it is her innovative treatment of the subject of motherhood through objects not people that queries not just what we value in art today but what has been absent from art’s historical past.