My paintings draw on women found in colonial and personal archives. I isolate the face — individuation as refusal of type — extracting each figure from her original photographic context and relocating her within geometric spaces. These hard-edged environments are constructed through a diasporic logic: the minimum needed to suggest a place while refusing fixed geography, or time. 

I work on dark grounds with atomised paint. The faces are meticulously rendered, acquiring a surface that appears untouched by hand — precision becomes both an act of sincerity and a confrontation with what can never be known. Gesture, drawn line, and fields of colour interrupt the authority of the archival image, creating openings for play, frivolity, and refusal.

The paintings become containers for misbehaving units of history — stories, behaviours, and people that slip between what is recorded and what is lived. To paint these faces is to make them unignorable without shouting, hyper-visible without resolution. The question the work asks, and does not answer, is how to address a gap without closing it.

——

Dora Lam is currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, supported by the Cass Art Scholarship. She is shortlisted for the Chadwell Award 2026.

She has exhibited at the ICA, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Museum of the Home, and The Ugly Duck, and has given talks at Tate Liverpool, Museum of the Home, and City University. 

Dora lives and works in London. 

EDUCATION
2026 MA Painting, Royal College of Art 
2021 Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Royal College of Art - Distinction
2005 BSc Business Computing Systems, City University London - First Class (Hons.)

AWARDS & SCHOLARSHIPS
2026 Chadwell Award (Shortlisted)
2025 Cass Art Scholarship Award
2021 Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) Award

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 
2026 Group Exhibition, LBF Contemporary (Forthcoming)
2026 At 5am, I woke up., FILET (Forthcoming)
2026 RCA 2026 Show, Royal College of Art
2026 ‘Ongoing’, Noho Showrooms
2026 Entanglements, Annex by Koppel Projects
2025 The Last Salon, Old Waiting Room Peckham
2025 Untold, AMP Gallery
2023 Not Too Sweet (London Short Film Festival), ICA
2023 Uncovering Vietnamese Archives, Museum of the Home
2023 ALTAR-NATIVE, Ugly Duck
2023 The Navigator Project, Fitzrovia Gallery
2021 Grayson Perry’s Art Club, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

RESIDENCIES
2025 Lost wax casting, Walnut Works Foundry
2023 Uncovering Vietnamese Archives, Museum of the Home 
2021 Intangible Cultural Heritage, China Exchange

TALKS & PUBLIC PROGRAMMES
2024 ESEA Critical Directions Panel, City University
2024 Game Night with ESEA Community Centre Panel, Barbican
2023 Heritage, Research and Collaboration Talk, Tate Liverpool 
2023 No Place Like Home Panel, Museum of the Home
2021 WE/MAKE/DO: Bridging the generation gap Workshops, Online