Artist: Charlotte Hickey

Year: 2026

Medium: Mixed media on vintage collage canvas

Dimensions: 36 × 24 in. (5/8" profile)

Support: 100% Cotton Canvas

In The Queen of Spades, Charlotte Hickey stages a portrait of

feminine power where courage is both public performance and

private reckoning. Built from vintage collage, painted forms,

handwritten text, glitter, and sequins, the work balances ornament

with psychological interrogation.

At the center sits a crowned girl in tears—a figure caught between

bravado and vulnerability. Around her, fragments of imagery and

text accumulate, including a clipping that asks What’

s Real? and a

bold phrase reading FOR THE WAR AHEAD. Altered by the artist

from its original text, the phrase becomes a meditation on navigating

a present that blurs the real and the performed, and on the internal

battles that shape identity: which gestures are true, which are armor,

and which moments are bravely lived.

Referencing the symbolic language of playing cards, the queen emerges less as a figure of luck than as

one of resilience, embodying the messy, complicated courage of being oneself in a world that rewards

spectacle. The work asserts that bravery is never passive but always chosen, that fortitude is rarely given

but always claimed.