ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Month - Feb 2021
4 Artists, 4 Mediums, 4 Countries:
Chonon Bensho - Painting - Peru
Polly Bennett - Ceramics - UK
Evdokia Georgiou - Drawing - Cyprus
Keith Buswell - Printmaking - USA
The competition is open to multimedia artists worldwide and created to showcase and promote the work of emerging and mid-career artists. The winners are featured on our website and social media platforms and considered for any upcoming curatorial projects by ART from HEART. Artworks were selected based on creativity, originality, quality of work, and overall artistic ability.
Apply NOW to be featured in March 2021!
Chonon Bensho - Painting - Pucallpa, Peru
©Chonon Bensho. All Rights Reserved.
From Left to Right: Rao Nete | Tita | Sueño Dietador | Koros Kene Embroidery | Maya Kene Embroidery
Chonon's work harmoniously converges academic art with the heritage of Shipibo artists. It is a modern and intercultural indigenous art, vibrant and contemporary, which relates to the transcendent and timeless through symbolic and archetypal language. Without rejecting Western contributions, Chonon's paintings are rooted in the ancestral stories of the Shipibo-Konibo, in the practices and plants of traditional healers, and in the perfumed world of the spiritual owners of medicine.
The Shipibo are especially known for their creativity, for the beauty of their embroidered and ceramic designs, for their artistic and philosophical temperament, and for the wisdom of their traditional healers.
The works created by Chonon Bensho provide a deep and modern testimony of the ancestral knowledge of one of the most numerous indigenous nations in Peru’s Amazon, Shipibo-Konibo. Artist and descendant of the Onanya (traditional medical sages) and Shipibo-Konibo women who have preserved intricate artistic legacies. Bensho was raised in a traditional environment, in her own language, and healed with medicinal plants used by people who wanted to master Kené designs, or geometric patterns that express the philosophical and spiritual vision of indigenous nations. The art of Kené accounts for the profound relationship among human beings with ancestral territories and spiritual worlds.
Chonon complemented her knowledge of these designs with academic research and presented it as a thesis to obtain her Bachelor's Degree in 2018, from the Eduardo Meza Saravia Art School, in the district of Yarinacocha, Ucayali Region, from which she graduated with the title of Professional Artist.
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Polly Bennett | Ceramics | London, UK
©Polly Bennett. All Rights Reserved.
From left to right: A Collection of Memories | Remains | Whats Left Behind | Urn | Memory Loss
Polly is a landscape artist “portraying the land, with the land” through traditional craftsmanship, using locally sourced materials in a process likened to alchemy. Combining a museological approach to materials with immediate observational responses, she collaborates with, and investigates the surrounding rural environment to re-visualise an experience it thus creating one for the viewer. The concluding work recollects the explored environment as a memorialised snapshot, producing abstract and deconstructed results.
Honouring our world, Polly is slowly cutting out all synthetic pigments from her work - decreasing her involvement in the carbon footprint of paint manufacturing - by sourcing all her own natural pigments.
Polly's current theme explores different methods of recording what the Thames leaves behind, and how it holds history. She is drawn to collect pieces signifying manual work, such as clay pipes or rusty manufacturing instruments from the 17th Century to the Victorian era. These pieces revive the ghost of the individual who once made or used them. This idea of manual work is reflected in the ‘making’ that is integral to her practice, and involving these found objects in a collated fashion results in vessels of remembrance.
Memory Jugs originated in Africa and became extremely popular in the Victorian era as they memorialised the dead with personal objects, and connected the dead to the afterlife by way of water.
Looking at the surface of these vessels, Polly has used discarded broken clay pipes and shards of bone from the Thames to reflect the individuals who once handled them, as it is said that personal possessions are often broken before being applied to Memory Jugs to help release the individual’s spirit.
Polly Bennett (b. 1996) graduated from City & Guilds of London Art School with a BA Fine Art Degree in 2018 and in 2019 completed The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers Decorative Surfaces Fellowship becoming an Honorary Freeman of The Worshipful Company of Painter Stainers, and also a member of the Wilderness Art Collective, a group of creatives whose work discusses the natural world.
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Evdokia Georgiou | Drawing | Limassol, Cyprus
©Evdokia Georgiou. Untitled from the Line Drawings Series, Watercolour Drawings on Paper. All Rights Reserved.
Evdokia's Line Drawing Series re-creates images of the surrounded forms and situations in nature, society and human’s daily life. She invites the audience in with her playful and yet multidimensional artworks to challenge the different aspects of a society.
Evdokia's art practice is based on sociological and philosophical research. Therefore, the artist illustrates the progressive direction of beings and the need of sustainability and consciousness towards the change in the social and private realms.
Evdokia is the Art Curator of the Exhibit 8 Gallery in the heart of the Limassol's city in Cyprus. In 2015, she was short-listed for the CVAN Platform Graduate Award, as a Fine Art Graduate of the University of Kent. She has participated in several group exhibitions and events in Cyprus, Greece, Ukraine, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom. She also participated in the Larnaka Biennale in 2018 and in Rome Art Week in 2019.
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Keith Buswell - Printmaking - Nebraska, USA
©Keith Buswell Etchings. All Rights Reserved.
From left to right: Hawley | Terrace | Downtown | Rue | Kirkwood
For artist Keith Buswell, community is a notion that we are not only connected to by our heritage or proximity, but also through an exchange of ideas and a desire to help one another. Trees personify this complex and vital system.
In 2016, ecologist Suzanne Simard wanted to find out if trees could talk to each other. What she found was a network of fungi underground connecting the roots of trees that not only relayed information to each other, but also provided nutrients for young and dying plants. This discovery is an embodiment of community.
Keith graduated with a BFA in art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He works with various printmaking processes such as screen-printing, intaglio and mono printing and dabbles in drawing and multimedia. He is currently a member of Karen Kunc’s Constellation Studios where he creates his prints.
Keith's work has been shown in the United States, Egypt, Dubai, France and Italy. Notably, Keith received the Perry Family Award in 2018 and second place in the 40 Under 40 Showcase in Annapolis, MD and third place at the Under Pressure print show in Fort Collins, CO. He is a contributing artist to issue 23 and 28 of The Hand Magazine. He also attended residencies at The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska and at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. Originally from Council Bluffs, Iowa, he currently lives in Lincoln with his husband Brad and his dog Max.
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Apply NOW to be featured in March 2021!