Bleusy Handels is a painter whose work explores the quiet structures of everyday life through a constructed archival world. through her ongoing series Unnatural Selection. This series of works presents a population of skeletal-headed residents whose lives mirror familiar human routines, including domestic life, civic roles, labour, and seasonal customs.
Drawing on Victorian portrait traditions, observational record, and a subtle surrealist sensibility, the paintings are presented as preserved documents rather than invented narratives. Each figure appears as part of a wider social structure, suggesting a society organised by shared roles, etiquette, and continuity between generations.

​Inspiration is drawn from  the uneasy distance, or estrangement, that can form around familiar memories, life events, and personal experiences, as well as by the way shifting social climates can forget, distort, or erase their own past. ​

The series began in 2023, during a period of personal upheaval, when the work had to take shape around the demands of care and an unsettled domestic life. Since then the archive has continued to expand, with new paintings added as further records of this imagined population.​Through this quiet, systematic approach, the works reflect on memory, belonging, and the dignity of ordinary existence - asking what remains when everyday lives are observed, recorded, and preserved. 

 

 Bleusy Handels has produced a variety of other works around her creation of her Unnatural Selection series, predominantly continuing in acrylics, as well as experimentation in other mediums. 

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Bleusy Handels lives and works in the UK. Enquiries and can be made via the contact page or email bleusyhandels.artist@gmail.com