Tag: contemporary artist
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.
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.