Blackadder’s interest in still life began during childhood. Her love of reading meant that she spent most of her younger years alone, where she became fascinated with local flora: gathering and recording plants in a herbarium and drawing them for her school art classes. After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1954, she began to develop her still life practice and collected souvenirs from her various travels across Europe, Asia and America to incorporate in her painting. Blackadder’s careful consideration of composition together with the use of negative space allows for complete focus on each object she depicts. Her travels to Asia in the 1980s strengthened these concepts, as she explored the traditional Japanese concept of ‘ma’, meaning a space or pause seen as intrinsic to an artwork and equally important as the subjects themselves.