Tag: contemporary artist
Nayeli Lavanderos creates intricate black-ink animal portraits that exist at the intersection of wildlife art, symbolism, healing, and personal transformation. Born in Mexico and now based in Portugal, her practice is deeply influenced by animal advocacy, shamanic traditions, and the Mexican concept of the nahual—the animal companion or spiritual mirror that accompanies a person through life. Each drawing begins with careful observation but unfolds through intuition, patience, and thousands of meticulously placed marks that slowly bring the animal’s presence to life. Working exclusively in black ink for much of her career,…
Robyn Palescandolo creates floral paintings that balance painterly realism with expressive brushwork, transforming flowers, fruit, and natural forms into deeply emotional experiences of beauty, wonder, and connection. Drawing inspiration from years spent studying art history, working as a designer, running a painting retreat in rural Italy, and continually returning to art throughout life's many changes, her work reflects both technical mastery and personal growth. Rich with soft pinks, lavenders, blues, greens, and luminous whites, her palette emerges from close observation of nature while gently heightening colour to capture emotion rather than…
Sepideh Shahgholi creates deeply personal paintings and wearable sculptures shaped by memory, identity, migration, and emotional connection to place. Moving fluidly between abstract landscapes, layered mark-making, organic forms, and intricate sculptural headpieces made from wire and natural materials, her work explores how emotions and memories live within the body long after places are left behind. Rather than beginning with fixed images, her paintings emerge intuitively through feelings, smells, colours, and fragments of lived experience that slowly surface onto the canvas through layered marks and washes. Alongside her paintings, Sepideh’s wearable sculptures…
Mona Lisa Safai creates abstract works filled with movement, texture, and emotional energy, blending digital art, photography, and traditional painting into a layered visual language that feels both physical and atmospheric. Rather than focusing on narrative or recognizable imagery, her work invites instinctive emotional responses through scraped textures, shifting colour fields, and bold palette knife marks that hold traces of process and spontaneity. Moving fluidly between canvas and digital mediums, she explores how texture, light, and colour can communicate tension, softness, disruption, and calm before a viewer fully understands the image…
Anna Klatt creates atmospheric landscapes that feel less like physical places and more like emotional states suspended between memory, softness, and transformation. Moving away from strict realism and technical perfection, her work embraces scratches, layers, blurred forms, and unfinished surfaces that hold traces of vulnerability and lived experience. Influenced by intuition, photography, and personal reflection, she paints from emotional memory rather than direct observation, allowing mood and atmosphere to guide the image. Collections like Nature Dreaming, Fragments of Becoming, and Winter Calm reveal her interest in honesty over perfection, where landscapes…
Irina Forrester’s abstract works move beyond representation, using shape, colour, and composition to explore identity in a way that feels both personal and open-ended. While rooted in classical training, her practice has evolved toward interpretation rather than accuracy, allowing emotion and atmosphere to take the lead. Her paintings often emerge from everyday observations, but they are distilled into forms that carry memory, presence, and feeling rather than literal meaning. A viewer once recognised a strong sense of female identity within her non-figurative work, revealing how her compositions can hold narratives even…
Constance McBride creates sculptural figures in clay that move beyond representation to explore what it feels like to exist within a body. Hand-building each piece from stoneware paper clay, she allows every surface to hold marks of pressure, time, and change. Her figures often appear folded, compressed, or suspended in moments of tension, reflecting both strength and vulnerability. Influenced by nature, memory, and lived experience, her work treats the body as a “dwelling place,” capable of holding both safety and confinement. Through cracks, textures, and layered materials, she embraces imperfection as…
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…
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.