Featuring Artists of the Season SUMMER 2026: Exploring Environment, Memory & Transformation through Photography & Painting.
- ART from HEART
- Jun 5
- 5 min read
ART from HEART is delighted to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Season SUMMER 2026 edition, featuring three artists whose practices explore memory, landscape, transformation, and the interconnected relationships between people, place, and environment.
3 Artists · 2 Mediums · 3 Countries
Livvy Dawson — Photography | UK
Katrina Avotina — Acrylic Painting on canvas | Latvia /UK
Monika Tkaczyk — Kiln-fired hand-painted glass | Poland / UK
Working across photography, painting, and kiln-fired glass, Livvy Dawson, Katrina Avotina, and Monika Tkaczyk each investigate the ways we perceive, experience, and connect with the world around us. Their work moves between environmental reflection, narrative imagination, and material experimentation, revealing both the fragility and resilience that shape contemporary life.
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 Livvy Dawson, Katrina Avotina and Monika Tkaczyk, the Artists of the Season featured for SUMMER 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 photographic explorations of climate and technology to vibrant, story-driven paintings and light-responsive glass works that embody transformation and renewal — offering three compelling visions of contemporary practice.
Artist of the Season - Summer 2026: Livvy Dawson -Photography - UK
Climate, Technology, and the Unstable Surface of Nature
Artist of the Season Winner Livvy Dawson’s photographic practice operates at the intersection of environmental awareness, technological experimentation, and material investigation. Working across digital photography, cyanotype, and camera-less processes, she explores how contemporary image-making can reflect the increasingly complex relationship between humanity and the natural world.
©Livvy Dawson, Mixed Media Photography, 2022. All Rights Reserved
Top Row, Left to Right: Green Approach; Blue Nature
Bottom Row, Left to Right: The Power of Water; Aftermath
Rather than documenting landscapes directly, Dawson creates abstract visual environments that capture movement, transformation, and uncertainty. Through varied shutter speeds, darkroom manipulation, and digital intervention, her images become sites of tension where natural forces appear simultaneously fragile and resistant. The resulting works challenge fixed notions of reality, inviting viewers to question what lies beyond immediate perception.
Drawing inspiration from environments altered, reclaimed, or disrupted by human activity, Dawson’s practice reflects on the growing divide between people and nature. Her hybrid approach deliberately blurs the boundaries between traditional photographic techniques and emerging digital technologies, mirroring broader questions surrounding authenticity, representation, and the future of image-making in an increasingly AI-driven world.
I am interested in how photography can reveal the fragile relationship between human intervention and the resilience of the natural world.
For Dawson, experimentation is both a visual strategy and a conceptual tool. Images are transformed through multiple processes, creating landscapes that appear familiar yet unsettled. In doing so, her work becomes a meditation on environmental change, asking whether coexistence remains possible or whether nature itself may ultimately resist the forces imposed upon it.
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Artist of the Season Summer 2026: Katrina Avotina — Painting - Latvia /Leeds, UK
Colour, Storytelling, and the Landscapes of Imagination
Artist of the Season Winner Katrina Avotina’s paintings celebrate the enduring power of colour, narrative, and emotional connection. Working in acrylic, she creates vibrant compositions that transform landscapes, architecture, and everyday encounters into richly imagined visual stories.
©Katrina Avotina, Acrylic Painting on canvas, 2023. All Rights Reserved
©Katrina Avotina, Acrylic Painting on canvas, All Rights Reserved
Top Row, Left to Right: When Everything Comes to Life, 2025; A Sense of Joy, 2024
Bottom Row, Left to Right: Dancing Where The Snow Can See, 2026; Twilight in the Tuscany Hills, 2024
For Avotina, painting begins with observation but rarely ends there. Drawing inspiration from her travels, memories, and surroundings, she constructs worlds where reality and imagination coexist. Scenic Tuscan hillsides, historic cathedrals, Yorkshire gardens, domestic interiors, and symbolic figures become woven into narratives that invite viewers to linger and discover their own meanings within the work.
Colour plays a central role throughout her practice. Influenced by artists such as Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt, and Pablo Picasso, Avotina employs expressive palettes and rhythmic compositions to evoke joy, wonder, and emotional resonance. Her paintings are less concerned with documentation than with capturing the atmosphere and feeling of a place, moment, or memory.
Every painting tells a story. Through colour and imagination, I seek to capture the beauty, emotion, and wonder I encounter in the world around me.
Based in Leeds for more than two decades, Avotina continues to draw inspiration from both her Latvian roots and her adopted home in Yorkshire. Through her distinctive visual language, she transforms everyday experiences into uplifting narratives that celebrate the poetic possibilities of ordinary life.
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Artist of the Season Winner Summer 2026: Monika Tkaczyk Kiln-Fired Hand-Painted Glass - Poland / UK
Fragility, Light, and the Possibility of Transformation
Artist of the Season Winner Monika Tkaczyk explores the interconnected relationships between emotional experience, environmental change, and personal transformation through kiln-fired and hand-painted glass. Working with a material that is both delicate and resilient, she creates abstract compositions that shift continuously through reflection, transparency, and light.
©Monika Tkaczyk, Kiln-Fired Hand-Painted Glass, 2026, All Rights Reserved
Top Row, Left to Right: After the Storm, the Land Remembers; After the Storm, I Root Again
Bottom Row, Left to Right: Fractured Alignment; Pulse of Night
Glass serves as both medium and metaphor within her practice. Layered surfaces, fractures, and luminous textures become visual expressions of vulnerability, adaptation, and renewal. Each work responds to its environment, changing according to the viewer’s position and surrounding conditions, creating an experience that is never entirely fixed or stable.
Drawing inspiration from ecological concerns, spirituality, and the unseen energetic systems that connect people and place, Tkaczyk approaches environmental fragility as both a physical and emotional condition. Her works explore how disconnection from nature can manifest within contemporary life, while simultaneously pointing toward the possibility of reconnection and balance.
Glass reflects the condition of both humanity and nature — fragile, constantly changing, yet capable of resilience and regeneration.
Created on delicate hand-painted glass surfaces, her works invite moments of contemplation and stillness. Through shifting reflections and layered transparencies, Tkaczyk encourages viewers to consider the invisible forces that shape both personal experience and the wider living world, revealing transformation not as an exception, but as a fundamental condition of existence.
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Discover more artists featured in previous Artist of the Season editions
Are you a multimedia artist looking to expand your visibility and reach new audiences?
Selected Artists are featured on ART from HEART website, blog, newsletter, and socials
🔗 Apply now: www.artfromheart.co.uk
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