She says: “W.K. Lyhne’s paintings pulsate with entangled layers and skeins of lusciously applied oil paint, scratches, and markings – part of her ‘love affair with the medium’. Involving painstaking research, art historical references and iconography, her work conveys powerful and engaging narratives. We see hints and fragments of Picasso, Caravaggio, Francis Bacon, Holbein, and Donatello, which she reclaims. She examines the ‘patriarchal church’s role in stripping Mary of her right to personhood, agency, and voice, relegating her to a perpetual state of the muted sacrificial mother’ yet these are not religious paintings. There is, Lyhne says, ‘an undercurrent of chaos that is both physical and emotional juxtaposition, to challenge the stifling and rigid structures in which we live’.”

Wainwright describes her paintings as impossible to ignore. “They convey important messages about our contemporary world of hybridity, humans and animals, and the pain of love and loss and mothering. They are powerfully resonant paintings for our contemporary times.”

For Lyhne, the ewe is an important recurring emblem. She explains: “I am interested in the animal we all are. My obsession with the ewe, a female sheep, is rooted in its potential symbolism within feminism and its relationship to the major trope in religion, the Virgin Mary. Historically our visual language for female suffering has tended to find beauty rather than injustice in women’s suffering and so our visual culture lacks a framework for finding beauty in a shouting woman.”

Each work in The Surrogate is named after the Stabat Mater: a 13th-century hymn that reimagines Mary’s suffering at the death of her son in song and therefore sound form.

Lyhne explains: “These artworks portray a suppressed scream, reflecting the confined space mothers often endure. The figure embodies an ultimately futile struggle, mirroring the modern farm ewe’s experience. Through abstracted elements, it confronts societal expectations of motherhood, resisting historical weight and commodification.”

Lyhne is currently the informal artist-in-residence at the exquisite London home of one of her collectors, Tom Price. “Imagine letting someone paint in your home?” she asks. The Wick can certainly see the appeal of watching her frenzied compositions come to life – whatever mess they might entail.