Tag: women artists

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 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.

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…