Anna Ilsley (b. 1982) is a Suffolk-based British artist who graduated from the Royal Drawing School, London, UK in 2010 and completed her BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton in 2006. Her myth-inspired paintings confront motherhood and the politics of the female body head-on. Her vivid, fleshy figures push against the limits of the canvas, asserting presence, desire and power. Drawing on ancient myth, medieval and renaissance art as well as contemporary experience, Ilsley’s work interrogates how women’s bodies are controlled, revered and feared. Her paintings reframe female bodies as sites of agency and excess, challenging the historical and cultural narratives that seek to contain them.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include those at Winch Gallery, Britten Pears (with Hannah Lees), Suffolk, UK (2024); Benjamin Parsons x Hannah Payne, Oxford, UK (2023); Galleri Tom Christoffersen (with Dan Schein), Copenhagen, Denmark (2022); and Asylum Studios (with Jessica Jane Charleston), Suffolk, UK (2022). Selected recent group exhibitions include: Strings Attached Chapter II, Pipeline Contemporary, London, UK (2025); and Crab Bisque, St Chad’s Projects, London, UK (2022). Ilsley has taken part in numerous artist residencies, including British School at Athens, Athens, Greece (2013); and Newnham College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK (2021), for which she received an Arts Council Research and Development Award.
Written June 2026