​Daughters of the Silk Roads
​Following her 2024 RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award to China, Elaine Woo MacGregor presents a body of work exploring identity, history, and myth. As a Scottish-born Chinese artist, Woo MacGregor uses these paintings to reconnect with her familial roots, using the Silk Roads—the ancient Eurasian trade route—as a central metaphor for cultural migration and human interaction.

​Her paintings feature enigmatic women journeying through cinematic, collage-like environments. By blending personal photography with fashion magazine imagery, she inserts deliberate anachronisms—such as a figure in a tank top and trainers traveling an ancient path—to bridge the gap between history and our contemporary reality.

​“I am not interested in history painting per se,” MacGregor notes, “but in distilling a sense of travel through time.” Her work avoids the heaviness of tradition, instead utilizing translucent colour and fluid gestures to evoke moods ranging from peril to tranquility. Influenced by oral traditions and the science fiction of J.G. Ballard, these works complicate immediate readings, inviting viewers to locate their own experiences within these layered, timeless narratives.

​Excerpted from text by Sam O’Donnell for the Daughters of the Silk Roads exhibition at A_Place Gallery.