Caroline Coon’s 2002 oil painting Self with Lilies reworks the long art-historical association between women and flowers. In Western painting, floral imagery has often framed the female body through ideals of beauty, fertility, delicacy or transience. Coon draws on that convention, but refuses its passivity. She presents herself not simply as a subject, but as an artist: holding a brush and positioned against a blank canvas.

This assertion of authorship is sharpened by the patterned painting at the top of the composition, made by Coon’s friend Pauline Boty, the pioneering British Pop artist. Boty’s presence places Coon within a female artistic lineage, countering the male-dominated histories of both Pop and figurative painting. The lilies retain associations with purity, mourning and mortality, yet here they become active formal and symbolic presences rather than decorative attributes.

As a feminist artist and activist, Coon has repeatedly challenged the social policing of women’s bodies. Self with Lilies belongs to that broader project. It uses self-portraiture, still life and painterly citation to confront conventions of femininity, ageing and spectatorship, transforming the flower motif into a statement of bodily autonomy and artistic self-definition.