Members Interview
Elizabeth Bessant’s work carries the weight of time lived outside the studio. After stepping away from fine art for 28 years to raise her son and build a career in couture, she returned with a language shaped by layering, fabric, and careful construction. Her mixed-media pieces weave together printmaking, fashion, and painting, where birds appear not as subjects but as quiet witnesses to domestic life. Familiar yet overlooked, they hold traces of memory, longing, and presence. Her work is not about starting over it’s about returning with everything you’ve gathered along…
Nadja Eleonora Milsten’s work sits in the space between doubt and trust. Her watercolor figures feel present but unfinished, shaped as much by emotion as by restraint. Some of her strongest paintings are the ones she almost abandoned—set aside for months until time changed how she saw them. Moving from oils to watercolor during a turning point in her life, she stopped painting for expectation and began painting from instinct. Her practice isn’t about certainty. It’s about letting doubt exist, stepping away when needed, and trusting that what doesn’t make sense…
Sara Jacob paints from the collision of cultures, memory, and lineage. Moving between Berkshire, Nigeria, and the North of England, she never tried to simplify who she was. Instead, she built her practice inside the friction. Using indigo-dyed cloth, ancestral symbolism, and even her grandmother’s original oil paints, her work holds history as material, not metaphor. In her paintings, migration is not just movement across land it’s what continues to travel through the body, across generations, refusing to settle into one story.
Nena Lang creates paintings that feel less like images and more like emotional presence. Built through layers scraped, pressed, and reworked with knives and rigid rulers, her works give form to what cannot be spoken moments when holding everything inside becomes impossible and painting becomes the only way forward.
Rooted in the body and shaped by constant movement between cultures, Helena Barbagelata’s work resists categorisation. Her images don’t offer answers, they confront the viewer with presence, vulnerability, and the cost of never landing.
Olga Hiiva paints the faces that were never allowed to remain. Working on tablecloths, nightgowns, and worn domestic fabrics, she restores presence to lives erased by violence and silence. Her portraits are not memorials of suffering, they are acts of return, carrying grief, love, and survival across generations, and insisting that what was meant to vanish is still here.
Raised between Japanese and Australian worlds, Nanami Cowdroy lets contradiction exist without resolution. Her black-and-white drawings fuse discipline with disorder, tradition with urban grit, producing images that feel precise, intense, and quietly unsettling.
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.