May Cockcroft (b. 2002) is a Cornish artist based in London. She completed her BA in Painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2024, and is currently completing her MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art.

In her practice, Cockcroft engages with painterly themes of concealment and revelation in a very direct way. Processes of layering, excavation, destruction, and washing are critical to the methodology. Drawn to aesthetics with layered histories - such as graffiti buffing, studio walls, and chalkboards - Cockcroft consistently connects her work to the real world, and to surfaces that hold the tension of before, during, and after.

Cockcroft combines construction and fine art materials in her paintings. Using acrylic as her base, she adds mediums, stains, emulsion, plaster, marble dust, sand, decorators’ caulk, chalk, and charcoal to explore dynamics of construction and deconstruction, labour and care.

Through painting, she explores how materials can be used in ways that work against their nature. Temporal materials are made permanent and robust materials lie delicately. Working anachronistically, drawing from post-war visual language to energise her practice, the paintings further align with themes of time and disjunction.