ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Month - March 2022!
4 Artists, 4 Mediums, 3 Countries:
Letizia Taliani - Drawing - Italy
Carrie Ravenscroft - Mixed Media - UK
Stuart Smith - Mixed Media - UK
Fiona Campbell - Sculpture - UK
The competition is open to multimedia artists worldwide and created to showcase, promote and raised the visibility of 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 are selected based on creativity, originality, quality of work, and overall artistic ability.
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Letizia Taliani - Drawing & Mixed Media Collages - Italy
© Letizia Taliani De Marchio alias Latina Zoich. All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Vamp Edmea Giotto belly tower; Edmea dancing with belly button necklaces
Bottom Left to Right: Edmea blu feathers and belly button necklace; Edmea on panty tiles
Hand drawing, digital collage, painting on wood.
Italian Artist Letizia Taliani trained as an artist working for architects in Luxembourg and the United States and moved to Milan in 1999. Her research on a personal contemporary style of expression sets in Pietrasanta (Tuscany), where she fully experiences art in an international environment. Her artworks, melting figurative and conceptual style, represent human worth and the inner instinctive emotions giving shape to our existence.
In her latest project 'Edmea' inspired by her great-great-grandmother, Letizia attempts to represent women’s need to feel free to be seductive and alluring. Yet the mystic power they have to give life and the mandatory scars (belly buttons) resulting from this. 'Edmea' wants to stop responding to ingrained gender over imposed roles and get rid of them.
Since I was a child, I became interested in the dual condition of woman, over the millennia, as a symbol of pureness, mystery and power to give birth and as an object of possession and obeyance.
Letizia overpaints on wooden panels recalling ancient 15th century tradition, featuring pop vamp seductive women worshipped, their body built up of ancient marble cathedrals exploding in sexy breath.
Letizia always starts hand drawing with charcoal, then she adds with digital effects additional drawings plus collage with fabrics, tiles, geometric patterns, architectures, flowers, symbols of female condition like seclusion, vulnerability, desire, pain, instinct, courage.
Her sources of inspiration can come from a golden gothic ceiling of a monastery in Milan or from ancient Sicilian kitchen tiles. She turns them into patterns fitting like a pantyhose. She depicts her figures wearing oversized heels and belly button necklaces representing lives given, the violent cut, scars remaining after relationships, the proof of existing love. As a caregiver 'Edmea' has huge hands but these are also to self-defense, to launch, grab, crush, and keep. Her eyes are headlights to catch the viewer's attention.
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Carrie Ravenscroft - Mixed Media - UK
© Carrie Ravenscroft. The Bigger Picture, All Rights Reserved.
The paintting is a mixture of metallic ink, neon acrylic, book text and shiny iridescent watercolour on 24 pieces of found cardboard (55 x 35 cm each)
Carrie Ravenscroft is an artist and a mental health advocator. She is neurodivergent and aims to address discrimination, stigmatisation and ignorance in her work in a way that is tolerable through colourful and whimsical paintings. She views art as a psychological escapism OR as an immersion. She loves blending pretty, shiny colours, painting on pieces of cardboard, mixing media and breaking art rules.
Carrie likes the idea of creating lots of small individual pieces that connect and create something big using discarded cardboard. They will align with one another, to create 'The Bigger Picture.'
I love the idea of neuroplasticity and growth mindsets; I have an anchor now inside me. I can use my brain effectively sometimes. I have the ability to compose thoughts and combine them to create ideas. I can think about the future and prepare for its actuality. And all of this is relatively new for me - I didn't know it was possible.
Along with the independent pattern on each cardboard piece, the separateness also reflects the significance of embracing individual identities within the wider community. Recently Carrie has been learning to accept her neurodivergence and stop masking in order to fit in with neurotypical humans. She is surprised by how liberated, excited and connected she feels, rather than rejected and ostracised.
Carrie is interested in moving from a perspective of duality to non-duality, without losing herself completely. The paint is partly 'colour-changing' and has an iridescent quality to it, which she has fun using. But more than this, it's ideal in representing individual perspectives based on angle.
Cardboard is cheap and easily accessible; it’s forgiving and flexible. It gives permission to have fun, explore and take risks. Each piece is unique, with its own pattern.
There is something grotesque in these patterns, like rotting skin or disease...but the colour and liveliness just about save them from vulgarity.
They could be in the body, in the brain, out in space, the results of seeing light in a different spectrum or through the mind during meditation, a dream, a trip - endless possibilities. Each piece is unique, with its own pattern created with marker pens! Inside the connecting shapes, there is an alternative reality/life which Carrie has given hints of: tiny illustrations are exposed through cross-sections.
The Big Picture is work in progress. Carrie is creating this project with Arts Council Funding and the mentorship of Jennifer Lauren Gallery.
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Stuart Smith - Mixed Media - UK
© Stuart Smith, All Rights Reserved.
© Stuart Smith at work, All Rights Reserved.
Artist Stuart Smith is a contemporary landscape artist based in Hertfordshire, UK. He makes drawings and printing plates outside in remote rural sites. By continually returning to the same places, he forges a close familiarity with each location.
Stuart uses physical elements of the landscape as part of the process (and often as the medium for the work). He draws with pigment extracted from earth and makes stains and dyes from wild plants. Mud and organic plant material are stuck to the paper or printing plate. Sticks and stones are used to scratch and incise the surface. This use of natural, native materials to create the work helps Stuart establish a direct physical and empathetic relationship with the environment.
In my working practice I aim to stay true to a philosophy of minimal intervention, conscious of the impact my activity may have on the environment. The imagery is developed as a consequence of this sensitive interaction with natural elements. It is also determined by an instinctive and spontaneous response to variations in weather and light, and to seasonal temporality: the transience of nature.
Stuart's work is simply an expression of his experience of being in these places. Not only it is specific to place but also strictly specific to time. He uses traditional materials e.g. Acrylic, pastel, ink etc, alongside the found elements in the natural environment.
Stuart studied for his BA degree Fine Art at The University of Hertfordshire before graduating from Camberwell College of Arts, London with an MA in Fine Art Printmaking. He has exhibited extensively and his work is in private collections in the UK, Europe and the US.
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Fiona Campbell - Sculpture & Installations - UK
© Fiona Campbell, All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right:
The Fall (Detail) 2017; 250 (h) x 240 (w) x 150 (d) cm - Recycled and found materials
Cocoon, 2017; 400 x 250 x 300 - Recycled and found materials
Glut 2018; 270cm (h) x 180cm (w) x 90cm (d) aprx - dimensions can vary depending on site. Reclaimed and found materials.
Botton: Matter in Flux 2017; Reclaimed and found materials.
Artist Fiona Campbell's work blurs boundaries between sculpture, drawing, textiles and installation. Large scale assemblages are approached as drawings in space, treating line as energy, extended into 3d form.
At the root of her practice is the notion of interconnectedness throughout nature, life’s cyclical persistence and transformation. Environmental concerns about human exploitation of nature and over-consumption inform the content, taking her work into the realm of artivism.
I am interested in tentacularity - linear life forms repeated micro to macro. These rhizomic connections are metaphors for life, vitalism and regeneration. 'Tentacularity is about life lived along lines ... a series of interlaced trails’ (Donna Haraway). Materiality and process are central - material as message.
My work is labour-intensive, and my use of found and recycled materials relates to waste, our relationship with matter, nature, and ourselves. Collecting materials is an intrinsic part of the process. Throughout, there is an underlying theme of sustainability.
Alongside her practice, Fiona works within the community: She curated and featured in ‘step in stone’, artscapes in Mendip quarries, 2015, ‘B-Wing’, Shepton Mallet Prison, 2019 (both awarded ACE funding), and Inch by IN:CH, art-in-cases touring South West UK, 2021. She took part in ‘Ingruttati Palermo’ workshop and exhibition, part of Manifesta12, Italy. Commissions include a canopy for Sarah Eberle’s Mekong Garden, Chelsea Flower Show, 2016, which won gold/best artisan garden.
Fiona is based in Somerset. She gained an MFA from Bath Spa University, 2018. She received a RSS Gilbert Bayes Award, 2019 and was an Ingram Prize 2021 finalist. Solos/residencies include Loft residency & Exhibition, Heritage Courtyard Studios/Gallery, 2021; ‘Offenders’, Cells, Town Hall Arts, Trowbridge, 2019; and ‘Found, Now Missing’, Voyages, Contains Art, Watchet 2014. She was highly commended for her Green Capital Residency, culminating in exhibitions at Create Centre and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2012.
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Apply NOW for an opportunity to get featured in April 2022 Celebrating Earth Month!
Increase your outreach, visibility, & raise your artist profile!