An oversized woman floats in the sky as if dropped from a plane or whipped up in a hurricane, her limbs caught up in currents of air. Below her are rolling mountains, a river, skeletal trees with new leaves on their branches – a sign of spring, fresh beginnings, a period of becoming. This is Learning to Fly, the titular painting of Eileen Cooper’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Tower Bridge, which leads us through spaces – and states – of transition and creativity.

Cooper has spent the last five decades exploring different aspects of the female experience by weaving together autobiographical elements with references from mythology, fairy tales and art history. She sees the female character in her paintings as an archetypal figure through whom she channels different emotions, often reflecting on women’s work and creative expression. While the majority of her works depict outside environments, this new body of work also includes compositions set within the artist’s studio, though, as with all of Cooper’s settings, the studio is less representative of a physical space than of a state of mind.

Red Studio with Peonies, for instance, depicts one of the artist’s larger-than-life figures cramped into a space that feels too small for her size. Dressed in an apron, paintbrush poised in her hand, she appears to be at work on a self-portrait. A vanity mirror on her desk reflects her image, though the painting itself captures a different face – or perhaps another version of self – while a canvas leaning against the wall depicts the artist at work. Each of these images serves as a portal into a different aspect of the creative self, suggesting that although we see the artist in the act of making, her mind is elsewhere. Side On, meanwhile, depicts a woman apparently at rest, lying awkwardly across a tabletop that also bears a still life arrangement including an empty vase, a china duck and a single bloom in water. The vivid red walls in both paintings create a feeling of intensity and intimacy. They are internal spaces, womb-like in the way they surround and hold the figures.

Despite the appearance of domesticity, the studio paintings also continue Cooper’s interest in the elemental forces, specifically wind and water. In Side On, the woman’s diaphanous blue shawl takes on a fluid materiality, spilling across the table; in Red Studio with Peonies, the titular flowers stand in a jug of water, while the rug on which the artist sits appears almost like a raft floating on a sea of fluid, turbulent brushstrokes that make up the ground around her. In Wild Iris, the central figure is caught in the act of pouring, while a small figure – another version of the self – sits immersed in water inside a vase of flowers.

While Cooper intentionally keeps her compositions open-ended, these elements create the impression of the studio as a nurturing as well as wild environment in its own right, a space that offers the ingredients for the imagination to freely roam. We see these ideas come together most clearly in Ginger Lilies where the studio is fully integrated into the open air. Interestingly, it is the male figure who is depicted as the ‘traditional’ artist here, while the woman is quite literally watering his imagination. And yet, her connection to water – the structure on which she stands is half submerged – subtly suggests a greater fluidity and openness, qualities that we might associate with a more fertile creative mind.

Elsewhere, figures fall through the air and water, their bodies interlocked or reaching for one another, as the world around them appears in flux, with little to no distinction between land and sky. Made at a time of global disquiet, these are works that reflect a loss of control and ungroundedness, but there is also beauty in the connection between the figures and the weightlessness of their bodies even as they support one another.

This, perhaps, is the art of learning to fly – finding a balance between containment and boundlessness, constraint and letting go. In Cooper’s world, flight is not an escape but a process: an ongoing negotiation with uncertainty, where creativity and freedom emerge not despite instability, but through it.