Celia Paul talks to Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian ahead of her new exhibition, Colony of Ghosts

'She shows me a painting in the studio. It’s called Weeping Muse and Running Tap. It is based on Freud’s Large Interior W11 (After Watteau), which is an enormous early 1980s painting of Paul along with one of Freud’s previous lovers, her child, and one of his children. Paul’s version retains just her own figure, her feet seemingly submerged in water. “I really, really didn’t like sitting,” she says. “I felt trapped, and I didn’t want to chat. I was always crying. And he found that incredibly exasperating. I think men are very perplexed and often exasperated by women crying.”

There is a tap in the background of Freud’s original painting – “a sort of signal to me,” she says, to “switch off the faucet”. Her riposte in her new work is to double down on the waterworks – that pool of tears under her feet. “I think men find crying exasperating because it’s quite a strong thing to do, isn’t it? I mean, it’s so ‘not done’. But it’s quite a subversive thing.”'

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Image: Portrait of Celia Paul, 2025

© Gautier Deblonde

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro