Simone Kennedy Doig

The Approach is pleased to present November to November, a solo exhibition by Simone Kennedy Doig, her first in London.

Kennedy Doig's works draw on her lived experience, but the resulting compositions occupy an imagined world of their own, assembled from memories, photographs and art historical and architectural references. Her paintings feature people close to her – family, friends, sometimes herself – but are not intended as realistic depictions. Rather, they offer a means of negotiating her own position and sense of belonging. Born in London, Kennedy Doig spent most of her childhood in Trinidad. Since returning to the UK as an adult, she has navigated an enduring sense of displacement, caught between two places that each feel like home, yet neither entirely so. Her paintings attempt to give form to these complexities, exploring how one's sense of belonging is shaped by the communities, cultures and places we inhabit.

While echoes of Trinidad shape these new large-format paintings, November to November is an exhibition about London. Loosely tracking a year of the artist's life through the seasons in the city, the show foregrounds several iconic buildings designed by modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin in the 1930s, including Highpoint in Highgate, Finsbury Health Centre and the Penguin Pool at London Zoo. These buildings hold personal significance for Kennedy Doig – their architectural permanence provides an important point of continuity amid a broader sense of emotional dislocation.

Highpoint is particularly meaningful to Kennedy Doig. Her mother bought an apartment in the building, but never had the chance to live there herself. When the artist subsequently moved in, her relationship with the building was strongly shaped by its guardian, the subject of César, Highpoint II. Kennedy Doig's personal connection with César sits in contrast to the building's austere architectural character. The painting has a slightly unreal quality, setting the geometric precision of Lubetkin's design against its faux-Greek columns. The resulting combination of architectural forms creates a sense of disorientation, with the boundaries and spatial relationships within the composition left ambiguous.

In High Point Bathers, three women – two of Kennedy Doig's sisters and a friend – sunbathe on the grounds outside the building. Here, Highpoint takes on a grander form: its tall, white towers loom against bright blue skies, resembling a luxury hotel on a Southern European coast rather than an apartment block in north London. The women gaze out from the painting, their close bond apparent in their relaxed familiarity with one another.

Throughout the exhibition, architecture provides a formal framework for the compositions, with geometric forms, curves and shadows shaping the relationship between figures and their surroundings. This is particularly evident in One for Sorrow and Finsbury Health Centre, where solitary figures appear withdrawn against the buildings behind them. In Finsbury Health Centre, the figure is diminished by the broad façade of the building, whose association with health and illness lends the scene an underlying sense of unease. In One for Sorrow, a figure dressed entirely in green, perhaps a zookeeper, looks towards the now-defunct penguin pool at London Zoo. Closed in 2004, the pool remains a prominent feature of the zoo detached from its original purpose. A pool without penguins, the painting conveys the presence of an absence. The leafless trees reinforce the stillness of winter.

In Carnival Sunday, Trinidad meets London in a collision of cultures and places. A stage set against a row of houses creates a painting within a painting, adding to the composition's disorienting quality. Kennedy Doig's handling of distemper paint is particularly apparent here: vibrant, gestural outlines contrast with more fluid, diluted passages of paint.

Through its buildings, people and changing seasons, November to November presents London as Kennedy Doig experiences it. Memories of Trinidad inform this perspective, but it is London, and the artist's experience of living in the city, that provides the focus of the exhibition.

Simone Kennedy Doig (b. 1994, London, UK) lives and works in London.