Blue approaches a large canvas as though it were a paper, leaving scrubbed out marks and translucent layers visible rather than smoothing them away. This openness maintains an honesty and a motion, with figures that appear relaxed one moment and contorted the next.

A close relationship between colour and natural rhythm is evident in Blue’s work. She speaks of scattered light through a tree canopy, at once still and vibrating, and of water that can turn from syrupy to turbulent in an instant. This pacing gives the paintings their energy. They never feel fixed, but instead register emotion as something changeable, flickering between vulnerability, force and release. As she told The Wick, she is interested in uncovering “a language of feeling that is both restrained and energetically freeing.” Her paintings are open and alive to change.

When curator Senem Cagla Bilgin-Keys first encountered Blue’s work at Slade School of Fine Art’s graduate show in 2019, it struck her with “almost visceral intensity”. She invited the artist into a group exhibition she was co-curating, and what began there has become an ongoing dialogue between the two. Bilgin-Keys has watched the practice become more distilled over time, but she still returns to the same quality that first drew her in. “Her work resisted singular readings, unfolding instead as a narrative in flux, revealing subtly shifting emotional registers with each encounter,” Bilgin-Keys told The Wick.

This sense of convergence runs into Blue’s next solo exhibition, Venti Traversali, opening at the Civic Museum of Palazzo della Penna in Perugia on 13 June. The show reflects on the natural, cultural and historical forces that meet in the centre of Italy, and relates them to the many influences that shape inner life – an especially fitting context for Blue’s paintings which are themselves built out of tension, overlap and exchange.

Asked about her biggest achievement so far, Blue does not point to a single accolade. What matters most is what happens after the work leaves the studio. “The paintings travelling and being placed in environments beyond my own experience feels like an incredible way to make connections and exchange energy.” This is a telling answer for an artist whose practice is so alive to movement, atmosphere and exchange. Her paintings do not fix emotion in place; they allow it to gather and shift between worlds.