Artwork

After completing an English BA at Clare College, Cambridge, she went on to study Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and earned an MA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art. She is the recipient of the 2023 Richard Ford Award and the 2024 Dolbey Travel Award.

Making paintings rooted in her own poetry, her work often depicts everyday subject matter infused with lyricism. She explores decoration and affect through a multimedia approach, blending papier-mâché frames, ornamental jesmonite sculptures, ceramic tiles, found objects, and mural trompe l’oeil devices to unpack intimacy, humour, sadness, and longing.

Poetry and close personal relationships are central to Santos’s practice. Writing functions as a way of generating images and sensory fragments drawn from memory, rather than from photographs or direct observation. Her paintings emerge from this internal archive, composed of recollection, emotion, and poetic language. While poetry often initiates a painting, her process remains fluid: sometimes poems accompany finished works, while at other times they follow, helping her to better understand what she has made. Although she values this dialogue between mediums, she gravitates toward painting for its immediacy, its ability to engage a viewer instantly, without mediation.

Her painting Prayer, part of a series presented at the London Art Fair 2024, draws from a week spent in Rome with her family, including her grandmother, who turned eighty this year. The work depicts a prayer alcove in St Peter's Basilica, inspired by a moment in which her cousin lit an electric votive candle following the death of her grandfather. The warm cadmium yellow ground evokes contemplation and can also be read as the soft glow of candlelight. While some of her works place figures centrally, in Prayer the figure is off-centre, inviting the viewer to step into the scene themselves. By suggesting interiors that extend beyond the frame, Santos creates space for viewers to project their own narratives and imaginings.

Her relationships also shape her work in profound ways. The people in her life act as both subjects and collaborators, raising questions around intimacy, representation, and authorship. She reflects on the ethical dimension of depicting others, who she knows well enough, or has the right, to portray. Figures in her paintings often hover between being representations of real individuals and more fluid, internal avatars or emotional stand-ins. This ambiguity reflects her interest in the overlap between the social and the individual, and the inherently relational nature of human experience.

Colour plays a particularly significant role in both artists’ practices. Santos is drawn to the emotional clarity of using a reduced palette, often anchoring a painting in a dominant hue to distil a specific mood. She explores the expressive potential of primary tones, as seen in works like Summer Storm, where vividly coloured ponchos, blue, red, and green, convey a sense of immediacy and joy. The symbolic and generative power of primary colour systems, from which a full spectrum can emerge, continues to inform her approach.

Completing her MA at the Slade marked a significant development in her practice. Beyond technical refinement and critical discourse, the experience instilled a deeper sense of confidence and trust in her own instincts. Embracing the “childlike” or handmade qualities in her work, elements that might once have seemed awkward or overly delicate, have become central to her visual language. Encouraged by her tutors to work intuitively and remain open within the process, she describes painting as increasingly joyful, immersive, and driven by a close, tactile engagement with the medium.