Shenstone’s portraits are always technically exquisite, but the intensity and scale of her giant conté drawings push the works from depictions into emphatic expressions of personality. This particular work feels like a sliver of time captured at the extreme of human emotion and represents Shenstone at her best: showing herself there in the moment, intimately alone with her subject but opening that out into an encounter that chimes with us all. It’s of little surprise that her conté portrait of Francis Bacon, which uses a very similar approach, is part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Shenstone’s portraits are always technically exquisite, but the intensity and scale of her giant conté drawings push the works from depictions into emphatic expressions of personality. This particular work feels like a sliver of time captured at the extreme of human emotion and represents Shenstone at her best: showing herself there in the moment, intimately alone with her subject but opening that out into an encounter that chimes with us all. It’s of little surprise that her conté portrait of Francis Bacon, which uses a very similar approach, is part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The chair people have been an ever-present theme throughout Shenstone’s career and were born out of her perception of the lives of objects: “The chair dwells in what I call a historical world. Everyone who has sat in it has left some kind of memory in the chair. It lives through time and accommodates people who want to use it, and that ingratiates it to me.” Each of the chair people have their own ingratiating character; they’re skinned of identity but bursting with personality. They all seem to be caught in a recognisable annex that straddles the real and non-physical world and the images unfold with hits of drama, of humour, the macabre, of pain, and all sorts of fleshy humanness in between. We’re all in there somewhere.