How These 5 Painters Use Art to Tell What Home Means

“Home is not just where we live it is where our stories take root, where our emotions find shelter, and where our memories linger long after the moment has passed.”

The word home may appear simple, yet it holds a depth that artists and poets have been wrestling with for centuries. It is at once universal and deeply personal, familiar yet ever-changing. With the opening of our international virtual exhibition, The Places We Call Home, we are reminded of just how vast and transformative this idea can be.

Every day, we are humbled by the submissions arriving from across the globe. Paintings created in quiet studios, sketches drawn at kitchen tables, collages pieced together in bedrooms and works of art shaped in fleeting moments between daily routines all of them carry something essential, something true. Each submission is a window into the artist’s world, a reflection of what belonging means to them. Taken together, they create a chorus of voices that echo across borders and cultures, reminding us of the many forms home can take: a room, a memory, a person, a sound, even a dream.

The exhibition is already becoming more than just an online gallery. It is a living archive, an ever-expanding gathering of stories that transcend geography. Each new submission does not simply add another artwork to a digital wall it deepens the collective narrative of what it means to find, lose, or long for home.

Five Painters Who Let Their Art Speak of Home

Among the wide and inspiring range of submissions, five painters in particular caught our attention. Their works reflect the many textures of home, its beauty, its loss, its comfort, and its complexity.

These are not finalists or selected winners, but artists whose voices we wish to highlight, to honour the generosity with which they have shared their visions.

Here is a closer look at five painters whose submissions invite us to pause and reflect:

Šárka Pham @sarka.pham

Šárka Pham is one of the amazing painters who submitted for our virtual exhibition The Places We Call Home. Based in Brno, Czech Republic, she is a self-taught artist whose journey into painting began at the age of twenty-six. Originally trained as a translator, Šárka shifted from translating words to translating emotions, thoughts, and fragments of the soul into images that speak directly to the heart.

Her artistic practice is deeply intuitive, guided by her feelings, imagination, and the moment itself. Working with both watercolour and acrylics, Šárka’s works move between two distinct worlds. With acrylics, she often creates abstract compositions, channelling emotions into bold, expressive forms that emerge spontaneously during the process. With watercolour, her focus turns to delicate female faces and figures gentle yet expressive personifications of atmosphere and emotion. Through the grace of smooth features, tender gestures, and soulful eyes, her paintings evoke connection, healing, and a profound sense of recognition.

Šárka’s work has been exhibited in Brno at Café Spolek (2020) and Café Liberty (2023), as well as at Open art Fest in Prague (2023). In 2025, she will also be part of the Festival Bohatství, further expanding her presence in the Czech art scene. For her, each painting is more than a visual expression it is a message written in the language of the soul, one that bypasses words to communicate directly through feeling.

Virginia Naranjo @artvickynaranjo

Another good and creative painter who submitted for our virtual exhibition The Places We Call Home is Virginia Naranjo, a Costa Rican multidisciplinary artist whose work is deeply inspired by nature, the sea, and the world of fantasy. Her practice moves fluidly across canvas, paper, and marine wood sculptures, often enriched with glow-in-the-dark elements that transform with changing light. This quality gives her art a sense of playfulness and wonder, as if each piece has its own secret life revealed over time.

Virginia’s work is as much about storytelling as it is about visual beauty. By merging emotion, imagination, and sustainability, she creates artworks that connect on an intimate level, inviting viewers to reflect, dream, and feel. Her submissions remind us that home can be more than a place it can also be found in the harmony of nature, the shifting of light, and the stories we carry within ourselves.

Yurdagul Konuk @gulaart

Yurdagül Konuk is another wonderful painter who submitted for our virtual exhibition The Places We Call Home. Splitting her time between Turkey and New Jersey, Yurdagül is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in deep reflection on themes such as transformation, migration, and belonging. Her background in theology, psychology, and art shapes her practice, allowing her to create works that move fluidly between the abstract and the figurative.

Working with mediums such as gold, gouache, acrylic, and natural-dyed papers, she often layers meaning into her canvases, treating them as living surfaces that hold stories of liminality and transition. Some of her paintings take the form of abstract explorations of absence and ecological imbalance, while others lean toward semi-figurative narratives that capture the human experience of being in-between places and identities.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including multiple solo shows in New York under the series Liminal Cohesions, presented at Awitaart Gallery and the Turkish Consulate’s Turkevi Center near the United Nations Plaza. Through these exhibitions, Yurdagül continues to expand her exploration of what it means to belong, to move, and to find home across borders. Her submission to The Places We Call Home reflects this ongoing search, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and recognize the universal desire for connection.

Mbaya Aisha @thembaya_art

Mbaya Aisha is another talented painter who submitted for our virtual exhibition The Places We Call Home. Born in Bauchi, raised in Lagos, and now based in Abuja, Nigeria, she is a multidisciplinary expressionist artist whose practice is rooted in both formal training and lived experience. Currently studying Fine Art at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Aisha blends academic rigor with a deeply personal, intuitive approach to her work.

Since her first group exhibition in 2015, she has steadily built her presence in the Nigerian art scene, exhibiting across Lagos, Kaduna, and Abuja, and organizing shows that create space for self-taught artists. In 2021, she launched her first solo digital NFT auction Women of Pride, marking her entry into the digital art space, while also sharing her photography collections internationally through Viewbug UK since 2020.

Her art practice often explores themes shaped by community, events, and human sensibilities, expressed through an Afro-futuristic lens. By delving into what lies unseen in the human soul and mind, her works invite viewers into worlds that are both mythical and psychological familiar yet ambiguous. They often embody a sense of power and transformation, leaving audiences with images that feel timeless, as if they belong to another era yet still speak to the present.

Marianna Natalello @m_natalello_art

Marianna Natalello is another inspiring painter who submitted for our virtual exhibition The Places We Call Home. Born and raised in Italy, Natalello describes life as having been made up of “many different lives,” each of which leaves its trace on the canvas. Guided by the motto Per Aspera ad Astra— “through hardships to the stars” her work reflects a journey of resilience, discovery, and transformation.

Since 2015, Natalello has participated in solo exhibitions, local and national showcases, as well as international collective projects both in person and online. After a period of reflection, her creative journey took a new turn in Cyprus, where painting became a renewed and profound part of life again.

Natalello defines her art as synesthetic to be seen, in their words, “with eyes closed.” This unique vision informs projects such as Helping to Help Yourself and Getting to Know Little Gems of the World, where painting becomes a bridge between inner experience and outer connection. Her submissions to The Places We Call Home embody this spirit, inviting viewers into a world where colour, memory, and imagination converge, creating a sense of belonging that goes beyond the physical.

Together, these painters remind us that no two visions of home are alike and that is precisely what makes this exhibition powerful.

Note: The artists featured here are highlighted as part of the many inspiring submissions we have received for The Places We Call Home. They are not selected or final participants. The official jury process will begin once the submission deadline has passed, and selected artists will be announced thereafter.

Why This Theme Resonates

Home is never just a physical structure. For some, it is tied to geography a street filled with childhood memories, a kitchen scented with family recipes, a garden where seasons mark the passing of years. For others, it exists in the intangible: the warmth of a voice across distance, the texture of earth after rain, or a fleeting sense of safety in someone’s presence.

For many, home is also shaped by absence, by migration, displacement, or memories that live only in longing. It can be a place left behind, or one that exists solely in rituals, stories, and imagination.

This is why the theme resonates so deeply. It doesn’t ask for a single answer. It invites us into a constellation of perspectives that together create a larger truth that while our homes may differ, the human desire to belong is universal.

Who Can Apply

This exhibition is open to:

• Women-identifying and non-binary artists worldwide
• Artists aged 18 and above, regardless of career stage or background
• Every medium and discipline, painting, drawing, textiles, photography, sculpture, ceramics, digital art, installation, film, performance, and more

It does not matter if this is your very first submission or one of many in a long career. Every interpretation of home has meaning, and every perspective enriches the conversation.

Participation Details

• Submitting your work is free. There are no fees to be considered for the exhibition itself.
• Artists may opt into an exclusive interview feature for $12. These interviews allow you to share your story, process, and inspirations with an international audience, giving context to your work and amplifying your voice.

Our goal is to make participation open, accessible, and inclusive, because the story of home can only be complete when all voices are welcome.

Deadline

Submissions remain open until September 7, 2025, at 11:59 PM EST.

There is still time to add your voice to this global archive, but we encourage artists not to wait. Your interpretation of home deserves to be part of this collective moment a moment that will continue to live and resonate long after the exhibition closes.

Share With Us What Home Means To You

Home not always walls and doors. Sometimes it is a fleeting moment, sometimes a longing, sometimes a truth carried in memory. While words may fall short, art has the power to hold and reveal these meanings.

Through The Places We Call Home, we invite you to share your vision, to stand alongside artists from across the world, and to contribute to a chorus of belonging that transcends borders.

Home is not always walls and doors. Sometimes it is a fleeting moment, sometimes it is a longing, sometimes it is a feeling that words cannot capture but art can. Whatever your definition may be, we invite you to share it. Add your story to this exhibition and let the world see the home that lives within you.