Category: Artist Interviews
Mónica Nicolau creates textile artworks that transform as light moves across their richly stitched surfaces. Working with commercial cotton fabrics, oil paint, cotton batting, and free-motion machine quilting, she builds dimensional compositions that sit somewhere between painting and sculpture
Leigh Witherell uses the human figure to explore the emotions people often struggle to put into words. Working primarily through figurative painting, she creates intimate images shaped by grief, love, vulnerability, loss, and resilience. Her practice is deeply intuitive, beginning with emotion rather than anatomy or gesture, and her figures have evolved alongside her own experience of grief after the unexpected loss of her daughter in 2021. Witherell’s work also examines male vulnerability, unspoken feelings, and the stories carried quietly by those around us. Through projects such as The Invisibility Project,…
J Reeves creates flowing abstract paintings inspired by nature, memory, water, and the freedom of seeing something different in every shape. Working primarily in acrylic, she builds organic compositions without sketches or predetermined plans, allowing one form and colour to respond naturally to the next. Her paintings may suggest birds, fish, leaves, or sea life to different viewers, but she embraces that uncertainty as part of what makes abstraction personal. After spending years creating work based on what she thought others wanted, J eventually gave herself permission to paint more intuitively,…
Discover the creative journey of Joanna Pilarczyk, from her childhood in Poland and television-inspired colour palette to her vibrant figurative paintings in London.
Joan Cox has spent more than twenty-five years exploring the figure, creating intimate oil paintings that centre queer women and the ordinary moments of their lives. Her couples appear in homes, parks, bedrooms, and everyday settings, surrounded by the objects, animals, books, clothing, and details that reveal who they are. Drawing from art history while reimagining familiar compositions through contemporary queer perspectives, Joan creates paintings that give women who love women space to exist on their own terms. Her work challenges the tradition of depicting women primarily through the male gaze,…
Gaëlle Étémé approaches art as an act of listening rather than control, allowing lines, colours, and gestures to guide the work as it unfolds. Working across Indian ink, charcoal, pastel, collage, textile, and painting, she has developed a distinctly calligraphic practice rooted in rhythm, movement, and the mysterious autonomy of the sign. Her journey began through sociology, metaphysical questions, and an intense exploration of the origins of alphabets, eventually leading her to draw lines continuously for a year and develop her own graphic language, which she calls the “alphabet of suffering.”…
Juniper Sikora is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice begins with a simple but powerful act: paying attention. Working across photography, sound, installation, bioplastics, field research, and participatory experiences, she investigates water as both material and collaborator. She collects water from specific locations, records underwater sounds, photographs droplets, creates bioplastics that physically contain traces of place, and builds experiences that encourage viewers to touch, listen, and investigate. Her Water Response Atlas brings these encounters together as an evolving archive of photographs, recordings, samples, and observations. Across her work, Juniper is…
Ellie Goodliffe brings her background in microbiology into a vibrant fine art practice that explores illness, human biology, mental health, motherhood, and the complexities of being human. Working across acrylic, alcohol ink, abstraction, and experimental processes, she transforms scientific subjects and difficult experiences into colourful, emotionally charged artworks. From cancer cells and neurodegenerative disease to menstruation, addiction, and mental health, Ellie uses art to make complex and often uncomfortable subjects more accessible, thought-provoking, and visually compelling. Her practice embraces both scientific precision and emotional expression, allowing biology and art to exist…
Alyssa Graziosa takes inspiration from the small details, textures, colours, and changing ecosystems she encounters in nature. Through painting, bronze, iron, and casting, she transforms these observations into artworks that move between reality and imagination. Whether recreating a tiny organism as a permanent sculpture or placing familiar natural forms into surreal environments, her work asks viewers to slow down and notice what they might normally pass by.
Through animals, stitching, and tactile materials, Hailey Harvey creates artworks that explore memory, vulnerability, transformation, healing, and belonging. Her practice brings embroidery, thread, charcoal, and ceramics together, creating surfaces that feel both intimate and physical. Inspired by the cross-stitch, embroidery, and crochet practices she learned from her grandmother, Hailey gradually developed stitching into an essential part of her fine art practice. Hares and lambs appear throughout her work as archetypal figures, carrying ideas of intuition, vulnerability, devotion, transformation, and hope. Through stitched marks, scars, seams, and layered surfaces, she gives physical…