Bleusy Handels is a UK-based contemporary painter whose work explores the quiet structures of everyday life through her ongoing painting series, Unnatural Selection.

The series presents a population of skeletal-headed residents whose lives mirror familiar human routines, including domestic life, civic roles, labour and seasonal customs.

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Drawing on Victorian portrait traditions, observational records and a subtle surrealist sensibility, the paintings are presented as preserved documents rather than invented narratives. Each figure appears as part of a wider society, with its own shared roles, etiquette and continuity between generations.

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Much of the work is shaped by the uneasy distance — or estrangement — that can form around familiar memories, life events and personal experiences, as well as the ways changing social climates can forget, distort or erase their own past.

Unnatural Selection began in 2023, during a period of personal upheaval, when painting had to take shape around the demands of care and an unsettled domestic life. Since then, the archive has continued to grow, with new paintings gradually revealing more of this imagined population.

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Through this quiet and systematic approach, the work reflects on memory, belonging and the dignity of ordinary existence — asking what remains when everyday lives are observed, recorded and preserved.

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Not everything Bleusy creates belongs within the archive.

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Other paintings have simply found their way out of her imagination. Free from the particular narrative, place or time of Unnatural Selection, they allow strange forms, curious characters and unexpected ideas to take shape on their own terms.

Whether part of the archive or not, Bleusy's paintings are united by a fascination with character, storytelling and the spaces where the ordinary becomes slightly unusual.

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Bleusy Handels lives and works in the UK.

Enquiries can be made through the contact page or via email at bleusyhandels.artist@gmail.com