Mia Wilkinson toys with Western stereotypes of the domestic female in her work, undermining the performative ideal of women as "the angel in the house." Her paintings electrify their figures with a grotesque, playful sexuality, placing them within caricatured, lurid domestic settings that blur humour, discomfort and desire.

Born into a single-parent, working-class family in the North East of England, Wilkinson has no relationship with her Asian father and limited experience of that aspect of her racial heritage. Shaped by a strong yet complex matriarchy, she grew up understanding that the female body holds both social currency and relative social invisibility. The experience of paternal absence, and its implications for her racial identity, combined with the dominant female influences that raised her, finds expression in the bawdy women she depicts—skewing and satirising culturally imposed expectations of femininity while challenging established artistic traditions.

Increasingly, Wilkinson turns the gaze upon herself. Finding herself as both artist and subject deeply discomforting, she uses self-representation to question longstanding conventions of depicting women, exploring the complex relationship between the female body, identity and the history of art.