ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

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What We Carry brings together a series of large and small-scale paintings that reimagine the bag as a portrait of the self. Each work begins with the artist’s own possessions, a shifting collection of tools, groceries, found objects, and fragments gathered through the day.
Screwdrivers, paint tubes, pasta sauce, rocks, fish, notebooks, conkers: objects chosen not for symbolic weight, but for their lived familiarity.

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By flattening and opening these bags, Munroe transforms the accidental contents of daily life into carefully balanced compositions. Every bag becomes a temporary archive of movement, making, appetite, and attention. These paintings open up the soft architecture of a bag  — a private space made public, an everyday archive of living. The recurring presence of the artist’s keys, to home and studio, introduces a subtle layer of autobiography: they act as signatures, as anchors of identity amid the disorder. The result is a series that hovers between still life and self-portrait, between representation and inventory — a study of how the things we carry become extensions of who we are.

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Each work begins in observation: people crossing streets, returning from markets, or moving through their routines, their bags filled with the small theatre of daily life. These gestures, repeated everywhere and by everyone, sparked the curiosity that led to this body of work. 

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The bags she paints are both theirs and hers. They hold what the artist carries — paint and pasta sauce, screwdrivers, vegetables, stones, a hammer, conkers, headphones, and always her keys. Keys to home, keys to the studio. The bags become portraits of the artist dispersed through others, shaped by habit, appetite, labour, and care. They are records of motion and intimacy, of all that passes between the self and the world.