ART from HEART is excited to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Month - September 2022!
4 Artists, 3 Mediums, 2 Countries:
Natalie Toplass - UK - Painting
Anya Palamartschuk - UK - Installations
Sarah Strachan - UK - Multimedia
Joanna Pilarczyk - Poland - Painting
The competition is open to multimedia artists worldwide and was created to showcase, promote and raise 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.
Apply NOW to get featured in October 2022!
Increase your outreach, visibility, & artist profile!
Natalie Toplass - Painting - Shropshire, UK
© Natalie Toplass, Bird Series, All Rights Reserved.
Top Left to Right: Elise's Silence; Broken Flight
Bottom Left to Right: Wildlife; Painted Lady
Medium: Oil paintings on canvas
Natalie started painting professionally shortly after moving to Shropshire in 2003, following her completion of a Fine Art Degree and a post-grad in Stage and Set design. Her interests range from capturing the delicacy of a petal or feather while also showing the strength within the subject; this is then emphasized by the plain background where a minimum distraction is sought. The focus is then increased to enable the viewer to be surrounded and drawn into what becomes a detailed perception of colour, form, movement, and texture.
Natalie wants the viewer to have an experience that trascends the image itself; therefore, the scale of her work is important. She often works from photographs translated onto a large-scale canvas. By enlarging the scale, the nature of the subject is intensified, and enables the viewer to become surrounded by its beauty.
Whilst my work is discernibly representative, I wish the viewer to feel drawn into what becomes for me a speculative concept of colour and shape. The medium is oil built up in layers over time to create a vivid and translucent finish, it also benefits by creating a depth and intensity of colour enhancing the drama and whimsy.
Natalie's work is inspired by the natural world displaying incredible diversity and tenacity adjacent with transience and fragility. This inbues a sense of wonderment and delight in the viewer, who is reminded that we are connected to all living things, that we are part of something bigger.
I’ve become interested recently in a still life aspect to my work, looking at old toys, bones and neglected and discarded objects and it’s these objects that have their own provenance, their own stories that I find interesting and I’ve realised that a narrative is fundamental to my painting.
United with this is the anticipation of nature reclaiming man made elements that were once so treasured and revered is fascinating and ever evolving. It’s these elements that fascinate me and I try to capture that essence in my work. I want the viewer to have the experience that is beyond that of the image itself.
The subjects themselves are just the starting point to study these elements; the effects of sunlight and shadows are also having an increasing effect on Natalie's work; the subtlety of colours captures a unique moment. Each subject is so different, offering delicacy and detail but at the same time strength and vitality. It’s these differences that fascinate Natalie and she tries to capture that essence in her work.
Natalie's work has been exhibited in Tokyo, Singapore, London, New York, and Australia, as well as locally in Shropshire. She had an article published in Artists and Illustrator’s magazine in 2007, Shropshire Living Magazine 2021 and has delivered several masterclasses as the prestigious West Dean College, in Chichester.
Natalie is a regular Artist in Residence at Nature in Art in Gloucester.
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Anya Palamartschuk - Art Installation - London, UK
© Anya Palamartschuk, 'Into the Garden', All Rights Reserved.
Medium: Projection Installation, 2022, 4m x 4m
Artist Anya Palamartschukis a London based multi-disciplinary artist exploring reflective, immersive, storytelling. By combining installation and imagery, they can make 2D images into 3D labyrinths of immersive images that abstract the boundaries between digital and physical space, inviting the audience to explore and experience their own journeys.
The theme of layers runs through Anya’s practice through the process of collaging different mediums, by the physical sense of creating fragmented spaces, and in a conceptual capacity, as their work explores the multifaceted nature of how we perform and navigate through spaces.
I like to draw from personal experiences, then fracture and layer them, creating palimpsests with sound, video, poetry, and paint to create rich environments for an audience to have a dialogue with.
Anya uses the power of storytelling in their work.
With storytelling, the most personal experiences can also be the most universal, and my installations explore this connection that we all have. As a non-binary person, I think about the body, performativity, and social masks. I am dedicated to sharing my narrative whilst uplifting others’ voices through collaboration.
Anya’s piece ‘Into the Garden’ was recently exhibited at Christie’s as part of ‘Un/Sense’ curated by the Kolletiv Collective to showcase 29 emerging artists.
“In a period of isolation, it can be difficult to sit with oneself. Your demons become inescapable. This project is about sitting with those characters and relinquishing their power over you.”
My work collages videos from the last two years as I spent time walking in nature, watching the seasons change. For me, it was a time of major reflection and I found myself writing as I spent more time in isolation. The poems and stories from my processing mind were tied to the steps that I took. When I visited the garden, the Jardín Botánico de la Universidad de Valencia, I imagined that people found themselves here when they had something on their mind.
The garden embodies a metaphorical purgatory for that dissociative state as you walk and heal. In a dreamlike landscape of psychological col-de-sacs and pathways, this video tells the story of characters who go on these journeys. They can only ‘leave’ the metaphorical garden if they find some reconciliation. As a projection, the maze of kaleidoscope images abstracts the boundaries between digital and physical space, inviting the audience to explore the garden themselves and let their own journeys form.
Anya is a resident at RARA Clapton and recently exhibited at ‘Un/Sense’ at Christie’s, Brighton Fringe and Ugly Duck. They has facilitated workshops at the Tate Modern, LungA Arts festival and Somerset House. In 2019 they received the Nagoya University Incentive Award and was short-listed for Future Artefacts 2022 and the New Emergence Art Prize in 2021.
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Sarah Strachan - Multimedia - Cambridge, UK
Sarah Stratchan, 'Precious Earth', 2021, India Ink on Canford Card. All Rights Reserved.
© Sarah Stratchan, All Rights Reserved
Top Left to Right: Interface, 2022; Beyondness, Ruskin Gallery, May 2022
Bottom: The security dilemma, 2022
Medium: Installations including ceramics, sound, video, made and found objects
Sarah Strachan (b. 1974 Andover, UK) is a transdisciplinary artist who explores her ideas through printmaking, painting, and ceramics; often fusing sound or moving image into the final installation. In her practice she senses environmental changes through deep conversations with people, place, the land and the materials and objects associated with these. Her interest lies in how our perception of being in, knowing and belonging to the world affects our ecological awareness and thinking.
My work seeks to question or disrupt habitual perspectives through the liminality of objects, materials, and the spaces I create. Working with ceramics allows me to explore complex issues of sustainability through my choice of materials and process – working with manufactured, recycled, and wild clay.
Whilst materials are important to Sarah’s practice, her creative concepts with a social or community dimension often feel more grounded and enduring. As such, collaboration is an important element whether as an independent artist, working as artist duos Itiswhatitis and The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity or as art, geology, and sound collaborative Mud Collective.
Selected recent group exhibitions include Fresh at the British Ceramic Biennial (2021), London Art Biennale (2021), Newplatform.art (2022) and Fresh Air Sculpture (2022).
Sarah was recently awarded the Art Resilience Sculpture (2022), she has won the Sustainability Art Prize at Anglia Ruskin University for the past two years (2021/2022) and won first prize at the ArtNumber23 Open Contest in Athens (2020).
Sarah Lives and works in Cambridge where she is completing an MA in Fine Art.
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Joanna Pilarczyk - Painting - Poland
©Joanna Pilarczyk, All Rights Reserved
Top Left to Right: Share a Dream, Portrait of Jarek, from Intimate Time Series, 2021
Bottom Left to Right: Bird of Paradise from 'My Paradise Series', 2022
Lazy Weekend from Intimate Time Series, 2021
Medium: oil, acrylic, spray paint on canvas
Joanna is a London-based contemporary figurative painter and art educator from Poland. She studied at the Art University in Zielona Gora and holds an MA degree in Visual Arts and Art Education.
Joanna moved to London over a decade ago, and fell in love with the city immediately. Amazed and entranced by diverse cultures and the vibrant energy, she began to paint oil portraits of friends and new acquaintances within the artist community of North London. Her recent artworks focus on self-portrait and the artist's relationship with her partner and nature.
Joanna's paintings from ‘Intimate Times’ series were created during time of isolation. In her colourfully decorated flat filled with plants, and isolated from family and friends, her surroundings and her partner became her only world, more intensely experienced and observed than ever before. Much of her work from this time focuses on self-portrait, femininity and intimacy but also on relationship with her partner and nature. She chose to capture herself in almost a dreamy colourful world enveloped by light, vibrant colours, patterns and textures of her shared home-cum-studio- the other character in her paintings.
My big pleasure is to observe the light and play with it, find a good composition and translate the reality into vibrant painted emotions. I want the viewer to feel the sunlight from my pictures, to enjoy colour and the positive atmosphere of a single moment of relaxation.
Pilarczyk is a finalist of Women United Art Prize 2021. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Recently, she presented her paintings from the 'Intimate Times' series at 'Memories in Hindsight' group show at J/M Gallery, Notting Hill, at ‘Press Play’ exhibition in Fitzrovia Gallery. Her paintings have been featured in various global art exhibitions and contemporary art publications including: Create! Magazine, All She Makes, Art Seen, The Huts, New Visionary and Singulart Contemporary Art Collectors Magazine.
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Apply NOW for an opportunity to get featured in October 2022
Increase your outreach, visibility, & raise your artist profile!