Category: Artist Interviews

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…

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.

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.