Bobbye Fermie
When the Black Birds Sing
2025
Watercolour on paper
56 x 76 cm | 22 x 29.92 inches
Deckled edge
Unframed
This new series of watercolours on paper was created during the summer months, following a period of profound loss. In these works, painting became a way for Fermie to reflect on and process grief — not through narrative or representation, but through the quiet discipline of material and gesture.
By paring back both palette and medium, Fermie arrived at a muted, near-monochrome language that invites stillness. The restrained tones and minimal compositions offer space for contemplation, creating a parallel reality in which absence, tenderness, and time coexist. The act of painting itself became meditative: attending to the slow pooling of pigment, the soft merging of lines, and the patience of waiting for paint to dry. Each work embodies this rhythm — holding within it both movement and stillness, a moment of pause and an unfolding story.
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When the Black Birds Sing by Bobbye Fermie
Bobbye Fermie’s practice is an ongoing internal response to themes of isolation, personal boundaries and social anxiety. Bobbye is interested in the archetypal designs of interiors and homes within theatre sets to express a juxtaposition between the public space and the private space. The watercolour paintings, explore an imagined world for a shapeshifting character that act as a way of processing these internal emotions through the use of these sets and scenes.
Bobbye completed the post-graduate ‘Drawing Year’ at the Royal Drawing School in 2015, after finishing her BA in Site Specific Art at the Royal Academy of Fine Art Antwerp in 2012. Her work has been exhibited throughout the UK and is currently held in several collections, including the Morritz-Heyman Collection, The Royal Collection and Soho House.
Bobbye Fermie