Members Interview

Selected for our Faces exhibition, Tanya Shark’s work stood out because it bypasses surface identity. Through animals rendered with quiet intensity, she captures emotional states people recognize instantly but struggle to name. Her late return to painting isn’t a limitation it’s the reason her work carries such depth and restraint.

Laura Fox-Wallis works in silk and dye, a medium that demands both control and surrender. Her birds are built through layered colour, steam-fixed dyes, and years of technical discipline, yet shaped equally by chance. What sets her work apart is her willingness to let the material speak back—to allow bleeding, blooming, and unexpected movement to become part of the image. Nature in her work isn’t decorative; it’s symbolic of impact, imprint, and consequence. Each piece reflects a balance between intention and unpredictability, asking what remains after the moment has passed.

Taylor Katzman paints what lives between guilt and forgiveness. Through expressive faces and bold acrylics, her work holds emotional tension without resolving it, creating space for viewers to bring their own unfinished stories.

Martine Jansen doesn’t fill space, she creates it. Through layered pastel paintings and restrained sculpture, her work proves that silence, patience, and refusal to overexplain can carry more weight than noise ever could.

Selected for our Faces exhibition, Moreya’s work stood out for its intensity and refusal to comfort. Rooted in instinct, shadow, and transformation, her paintings reveal the parts of ourselves we’re taught to hide and dare us to look anyway.

While reviewing submissions for our virtual exhibition Birds, hosted on Women in Arts Network, Severine Pineaux’s work stopped us mid-scroll and not for the reasons you’d expect. Her paintings didn’t give us beautiful birds in realistic detail or poetic interpretations of flight. They gave us something far more unsettling: trees with human faces, animals merged with mechanical parts, beings that existed in multiple states at once. At first glance, you might think you’re looking at fantasy. But the longer you stay with her work, the more you realize she’s not painting…

Selected for our Birds virtual exhibition, Jennifer Holmes’ work stood out for its softness and restraint. Through flowers, animals, and light, she builds visual narratives that value stillness, mystery, and emotional depth over spectacle.

Malu Urruspuru paints from instinct rather than concept. Her birds, animals, and faces emerge from feeling, not performance offering a deeply human reflection on creativity, limitation, and the strength found in beginning again.

For Stephanie Swilley, art and care are inseparable. Her practice weaves beauty, ecological awareness, and mutual aid into a single gesture proving that tenderness can be radical, and art can help reshape how we live together.

Patricia Frederick makes a mark on canvas and then waits to see what it wants to become. In this interview, the retired art educator talks about her process-based approach to painting, the difficulty of trusting gut feeling over years of design training, and how her work has turned into a way of investigating consciousness. She discusses what happens when paintings show her thoughts before she recognizes them, why she stays away from anything resembling a horizon line, and what she means when she says her work is supposed to act as…