The Edinburgh studio of artist Everlyn Nicodemus

Before writer, curator and artist Everlyn Nicodemus even picked up a paintbrush in her compact studio in the Edinburgh Printmakers building (you can cross the room in three strides), she covered the floor in plastic sheets - 'from habit', she says. Her 40-year career is currently the subject of a retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland, but it was only two years ago that she stopped working from home: 'I've always rented and, if you make a mess, you don't get your deposit back.'

Everlyn has become known for works that are unflinching in their reference to the marginalisation of women and her own experience of post-traumatic stress disorder. She grew up in Tanzania in the early years of independence and her adult life has been peripatetic. She moved to Sweden in 1973 and there followed years in France and Belgium before she arrived in Scotland in 2008. Along the way, Everlyn experienced 'extremely severe racism, prejudice and isolation' and, in 1988, suffered 'an almost fatal breakdown'.

She had begun making art in 1980 - untaught apart from one weekend course - and writing poetry. 'The ideas come at the same time,' she says. Her paintings, collaged books and photographs have been a means of processing her experiences and amplifying the voices of women who have been sidelined. Everlyn has exhibited in Tanzania and across Europe and Asia, and has a PhD in African Modern Art and Black Cultural Trauma from Middlesex University

The years had been marked by financial instability until, in 2022, as the result of a solo exhibition with Richard Saltoun gallery, a 1982 self-portrait was bought by the National Portrait Gallery (its first such acquisition from a black female artist) and she also received the Freelands Award. This is a prize established specifically for mid-career women artists who might not previously have received the recognition that they deserved.

Everlyn has since begun a series of large-scale, bold-hued and strikingly energetic oil paintings that differ from earlier works, being expressions of ‘the joy of being a woman and becoming what I was told I could not be’. She ponders whether the series is called Lazarus Jacaranda 'because I too have come back from the dead?' Adding to the new-found positivity is her studio. 'You can't invite curators and journalists to your spare room. It has given me an identity as a professional artist and that has changed me,' she says - proving that size is irrelevant to the sorcery of such a space.

'Everlyn Nicodemus' is at Modern One, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, until Mav 25: nationalgalleries.org | richardsaltoun.com