Daisy McMullan is an artist who creates richly layered paintings that document the natural world.

Inspired by magical realism and the ever-changing soul of the landscape, her work employs expressive colour and mark-making to craft otherworldly interpretations of everyday scenes. Her shimmering paintings capture the glimmers of hope and joy found in nature, for those willing to look closely enough.

Daisy’s paintings frequently feature the verges, lines, and paths that map out ways of navigating the world both physically and emotionally. These are places she walks regularly - overlooked, common spaces that belong to everyone and no one. They are small wildernesses, uncultivated and irregular, which Daisy transforms into imaginative compositions, with multiple layers of colour and glazes creating a sense of layered stories and narratives within these marginal spaces.

The compositions play with the sacred geometries of nature, such as spirals, circles and webs. These patterns are inspired by the research of artist and permaculture expert Liz Postlethwaite, and the writings on deep ecology and systems thinking by scholar Joanna Macy. Many of the paintings are marked by contrasting flatness and depth, manipulating traditional methods of conjuring perspective and depth on the painting's surface.

Each painting is a meditation on an interaction with the natural world—a rewilding of the mind, self, and soul. The Romantic ideals of returning to nature, individual spirituality, and treading ancient paths to commune with the metaphysical deeply influence her creative process.

Daisy's work also references Dutch Golden Age still life and forest floor paintings, where life, death, and spirit are carefully balanced and observed in sharply contrasting tones. Her expressive mark-making draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, particularly the works of Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner. There is also a distinctive English folkloric quality to Daisy's paintings that resonates with the work of Albert Durer Lucas and Lucian Freud’s approach to painting plants.

These works serve as records of nature, preserving seemingly unimportant details for a future time. Yet they are also deeply concerned with the technology and theory of painting, involving constant and rigorous experiments with colour, opacity, viscosity, and temperature. Daisy carefully selects her palette to render plant life in a unique way that imparts feeling, texture, and movement to her paintings.

Natural forms in Daisy’s work are built using a combination of free, expressive strokes, textural stippling, and folk art-inspired lines that shape leaves and petals. The use of tonal layers, akin to the construction of a screen print, helps build movement and tension between translucent and opaque forms. A key technique of underpainting, inspired by the old masters, adds luminous depth. These ideas and techniques are gradually layered, with colour and light added incrementally until a beautiful image emerges from the dark.

Daisy trained as a fine artist at Wimbledon School of Art and Camberwell College of Arts, earning a BA (Hons) in Painting in 2007. She later pursued a Master’s in Curating at Chelsea College of Art and Design and was awarded a two-year Research Fellowship in 2012 at Chelsea Space, a public gallery at the College. Daisy currently works as an artist, educator, and curator.

Notable solo exhibitions by Daisy include 'Observed Imagined Remembered' at Cass Art Kingston (2022) and 'Rewildings' at Dorking Museum (2022). She has also participated in group shows such as 'Summer Exhibition 2024' at Cynthia Corbett Gallery (2024), 'HERO' at Great West Gallery (2024), 'Mirror of Life' and 'Abstract Worlds' at Croydon Art Space (2024 and 2023), 'Winter Group Show' at Folkestone Art Gallery (2023), and the 'Young Masters' Invitational Exhibition at The Exhibitionist Hotel (2023-24). Daisy made her debut at the British Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery with Cynthia Corbett Gallery in 2023 and returned with a new body of work on linen in 2024. She was also selected for the Women in Art Fair Artist' Spotlight section in 2024, and was shortlisted for the SAA Artist of the Year People’s Choice Award in 2022.

Daisy works from her studio in Brixton, South London, creating paintings and exhibitions that reflect on nature and place. These works become emotional documents, depicting unseen feelings as much as they record the visible world.