Members Interview

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.

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.