Artists of the Season SPRING 2026: Mixed Media and Painting by Rosie Leventon, Kate Emily Kelly & Kristine M. Karo
- ART from HEART
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
ART from HEART is delighted to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Season SPRING 2026 edition, featuring three artists whose practices explore material, perception, and place through painting and mixed media.
3 Artists · 2 Mediums · 2 Countries
Rosie Leventon — Mixed Media Environmental Art | UK
Kate Emily Kelly — Contemporary Portrait Painting | UK
Kristine M. Karo — Mixed Media Sensory Landscape | Latvia / UK
Artist of the Season is ART from HEART’s open call for artists created to discover, promote and raise the visibility of emerging and mid-career multimedia artists worldwide.
Selected artists are featured across the ART from HEART platform, including our website, blog, newsletter, and social media, and may also be considered for future curatorial projects and exhibitions.
Artworks are selected based on creativity, originality, quality of work, and overall artistic vision.
Continue reading to discover the practices of Rosie Leventon, Kate Emily Kelly, and Kristine M. Karo, the Artists of the Season for SPRING 2026.
Apply NOW for an opportunity to be featured as Artist of the Season in 2026
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Each artist approaches material and subject from a distinct perspective -from environmental installation and abstract landscape to contemporary feminist portraiture -offering three compelling visions of contemporary practice today.
Artist of the Season - Spring 2026: Rosie Leventon - Mixed Media Environmental Art - UK
Landscape, Memory, and the Illusion of Permanence
Artist of the Season Winner Rosie Leventon’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, environmental art, and drawing. Working across architectural interiors and landscapes, she creates subtle interventions that reshape how we experience space, from floating floors and altered corridors to sculptural works embedded within natural environments.
©Rosie Leventon, All Rights Reserved
Top Row, Left to Right: Flowing - with red, mauve and green, 2025 & Painting with ink, green and yellow, 2024
Bottom Row, Left to Right: Flowing - with mauve and green, 2024 & Naples Yellow and Terracotta, 2022
Her work often explores what lies beneath the visible surface. Drawing on a background in archaeology, Leventon approaches sites as layered environments where traces of the past, forgotten histories, and overlooked ecological relationships can be revealed. Through materials ranging from recycled objects to stone, earth, water, and wood, she constructs works that invite reflection on vulnerability, absence, and the illusion of permanence.
Environmental sensitivity runs throughout her practice. Many of her outdoor installations respond directly to the landscape, integrating ecological function alongside sculptural presence, supporting biodiversity, providing water for wildlife, or encouraging renewed attention to the ways humans inhabit shared environments. This same sensitivity to place extends into her abstract landscape paintings, where shifts of light, colour, and form evoke the layered histories and quiet transformations embedded within natural environments.
Many of the works are about things that have been lost, hidden or forgotten, and about the illusion of solidity and permanence in life.
Leventon’s practice exemplifies how sculpture can move beyond object-making into a dialogue with place, ecology, and collective memory, revealing the fragile, shifting foundations of the environments we inhabit.
About the Artist
Rosie Leventon is a British sculptor working across sculpture, installation, and environmental art. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including at the Serpentine Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Battersea Arts Centre, the National Maritime Museum, and the Royal Society of Sculptors in London.
International presentations include exhibitions at the Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona, Der Pfalzgalerie in Germany, the Dostoyevsky Museum in St Petersburg, the Prague Festival of Contemporary Art, and the Convergence International Arts Festival in Rhode Island, USA.
Leventon has realised major public art commissions for Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Stour Valley Arts, the Irwell Sculpture Trail, and the Woodland Trust’s Diamond Jubilee Woods. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Royal Society of Sculptors Spotlight Award, the Felix & Spear Prize, and the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award, supported by the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust. Her work is held in collections including the Henry Moore Institute.
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Artist of the Season Spring 2026: Kate Emily Kelly - Contemporary Portrait Painting - Norfolk, UK
Portraiture, Presence, and the Politics of Representation
Artist of the Season Winner Kate Emily Kelly’s painting practice explores portraiture as a space for voice, agency, and feminist inquiry. Working from staged and candid photographic references, she creates intimate depictions of women whose identities unfold through gesture, pattern, tattoos, jewellery, and spatial composition.
©Kate Emily Kelly, All Rights Reserved
Top Row, Left to Right: Left on Read, 2026 & Focus On Women So We Can Give Them Some Confidence, 2024
Bottom Row, Left to Right: You Are In A World Of Your Own, 2023 & Reflections To A Calmer Time, 2026
Rooted in intersectional feminism and biographical experience, her work challenges traditional portrayals of women within the history of painting. Rather than passive subjects, the women in Kelly’s portraits are active participants, present, vocal, and occupying space within the image narrative.
Materiality and process are central to her practice. Working with egg tempera, watercolour, and coloured pencil, Kelly often allows the underlying structure of the painting to remain visible. Lines emerge through layers, areas remain deliberately unresolved, and the surface reveals the physical journey of the work itself, creating a visual space where new feminist possibilities can continue to unfold.
For me, re-examining and giving a platform to the female experience from women’s perspectives is still radical.
Through this approach, Kelly repositions portraiture as a site of dialogue, where personal histories, collective experience, and feminist thought intersect.
About the Artist
Kate Emily Kelly is a British painter and educator based in Norfolk. She studied Fine Art Painting at the University of Brighton (BA) and Camberwell College of Arts, UAL (MA), and has undertaken international artist residencies including the Cyprus School of Art and Organhaus Art Space in Chongqing, China.
Her collaborative practice centres on portraiture, exploring the intersections of painting, voice, biography, and feminist theory. Through projects such as SURGE III and Women of the NHS, Kelly works closely with participants to develop portraits that reflect lived experience and contemporary feminist dialogue.
Alongside her artistic practice, she holds a PGCE from the University of Buckingham and works as an educator, continuing to explore how painting can function as a space for representation, critical reflection, and collective storytelling.
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Artist of the Season Winner Spring 2026: Kristine M Karo - Mixed Media Sensory Landscape - Latvia/UK
Texture, Landscape, and the Sensory Memory of Place
Artist of the Season Winner Kristine M. Karo’s multidisciplinary practice explores the emotional and sensory relationships between people, nature, and environment. Working across painting, photography, and mixed media, she creates tactile abstract landscapes that evoke earth formations, coastal rhythms, and organic structures.
©Kristine M Karo, All Rights Reserved
Top Row, Left Sensory Faculty, 2019, Mised Media on canvas with integrated sound
Bottom Row, Left Look Up, 2018, Mixed Media on canvas
Materiality sits at the heart of her work. Through layered surfaces, textured marks, and shifting depths, Karo invites viewers to move beyond purely visual perception and experience art through the body and the senses. Her paintings often suggest geological formations, tidal movements, or weathered terrain — landscapes that feel both physical and emotional.
Sound and atmosphere also inform her practice, expanding the work into a more immersive experience where memory, texture, and environment intertwine. These sensory elements reflect her ongoing exploration of displacement, resilience, and reconnection — themes shaped by her journey from Latvia to the United Kingdom.
Each piece becomes more than an image; it becomes an experience.
Through this tactile approach, Karo encourages audiences to slow down and engage with art as a living surface, where texture, memory, and landscape converge.
About the Artist
Kristine M. Karo is a multidisciplinary visual artist and photographer originally from Latvia and based in the United Kingdom. Her work explores sensory relationships between people, place, and environment through photography, mixed media, and tactile abstraction.
She holds a Foundation Degree in Contemporary Arts Practice from Staffordshire University, alongside a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design and a Diploma in Photography with Distinction. Her education established a strong conceptual and technical foundation across fine art and contemporary photography.
Karo previously founded and managed her own gallery, curating exhibitions and supporting artistic collaboration. Today, her practice focuses on textured abstract works inspired by coastal landscapes, natural formations, and the sensory experience of materials.
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Discover more artists featured in previous Artist of the Season editions
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