Members Interview

Maryna Tsoneva grew up in Soviet Ukraine surrounded by grey streets and scarcity, but one art book changed everything. Today she paints portraits in oil that don’t just resemble people, they hold what they carry inside. Through restrained brushwork and quiet emotional depth, her faces invite viewers to pause, look closer, and feel the unspoken stories beneath the surface.

Marika Junikajtes returned to painting after a deeply personal loss in 2024, discovering that paint could hold what words could not. Through layered blacks, fluid pours, and precise brushwork, her portraits explore dignity, vulnerability, and quiet strength. Each face carries stillness, resilience, and emotional depth, inviting viewers into a slow and personal dialogue that unfolds over time.

Mahony Maia Kiely creates women’s faces directly in red desert sand, casting them in plaster before the wind erases them. Rooted in decades of working with land, community, and story, her practice moves between sculpture, performance, and ceremony, listening closely to place and transforming fleeting marks in the earth into lasting forms that honour memory, connection, and the voices the land holds.

Selected for our Faces exhibition, Michele Rogers works with repurposed barn wood, scrap metal, and unpredictable materials she refuses to control. Instead of erasing their history, she lets every scratch and dent remain, building sculptures that honor survival, surrender, and the quiet necessity of making.

Selected for our Birds exhibition, Gitta Pardoel brings decades of architecture and garden design into her art, creating spaces that feel alive with memory, movement, and the quiet presence of nature. Her work reflects a deep understanding of how living forms shape atmosphere, where birds become part of a larger story of space, freedom, and connection.

For decades, Nerea Azanza couldn’t create. Not because she stopped loving art, but because a medical mistake silenced the part of her that made it possible. When her creativity finally returned, she didn’t paint loudly. She painted tiny human faces fragile, almost dissolving into vast spaces of line and structure. Because to her, we are dust in a universe we barely respect. And humility, after everything, felt necessary.

Some paintings ask you to admire them. Sally Edmonds’ work asks you to look back. By removing every distraction, she brings you face to face with a bird as an individual present, aware, impossible to ignore. What seems simple at first becomes something else entirely: a moment of recognition, where a subject you’ve overlooked your whole life suddenly feels personal.

Paloma Ripollés doesn’t paint what she sees she paints what moves through her. Years of training gave her precision, but it’s her instinct that gives the work life. Using a spatula instead of a brush, she builds color in layers that feel like they’re vibrating, shifting, breathing. She never uses black, choosing instead to create depth through living colour. The result is work that doesn’t just sit on the surface it exists in a state of movement, where emotion, memory, and perception merge. What you see isn’t just a place or…

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…