At the centre of Mary Gilbert's recent still life paintings is Mario, a wooden mannequin who asks no payment beyond being oiled and rubbed with beeswax at the close of each painting. He is the constant in a body of work built from theatrical light, careful staging, and a cast of cherished and newly found objects, arranged and rearranged until an emotional balance is struck.

Gilbert was first taught to paint and draw by her parents, Joan Musker and Dennis Gilbert, before completing a foundation at Chelsea and a degree in Fine Art at Falmouth, where she was mentored by painter Philip Hogben. London has shaped her work ever since: she has drawn at the UCH Dissection Suite and the Grant Museum, taken life-drawing classes at the London Sketch Club, sketched animals at ZSL, and painted still lifes at Pollock's Toy Museum. Since the age of seventeen she has swum at the Serpentine Swimming Club, a ritual that continues to surface in her paintings.

Each piece begins, in Gilbert's own words, as a "scene": an idea of a situation or emotion, furnished with objects until the right visual and emotional balance emerges. Working most often with a single light source, she creates compositions of intense dynamism and contrast.

That instinct to care for and arrange — to find balance in a difficult situation — runs through Gilbert's life beyond the studio. She has worked as a school art teacher, a private art tutor, a foster carer, head of a Montessori school, and a carer for neurodiverse adults and children and, most recently, in care work. To find time to paint she wakes in the early hours, her paintings often taking hundreds of hours to complete.