Featuring Artists of the Season AUTUMN 2026: Exploring identity, memory, and the everyday through different approaches to painting and mixed-media practice.
- ART from HEART
- 14 hours ago
- 7 min read
ART from HEART is delighted to announce the Winners of the Artist of the Season AUTUMN 2026 edition, featuring three artists whose practices explore identity, memory, landscape, and the everyday through distinct approaches to portraiture, painting, and mixed-media practice.
3 Artists · 1 Medium · 2 Countries
Barbara Hulme — Mixed Media Portrait Painting | UK
Dalma Göncz — Mixed Media Landscape Painting | Hungary / UK
Paula Reece — Mixed Media Figurative Painting | UK
Working across portraiture, landscape, and figurative painting, Barbara Hulme, Dalma Göncz, and Paula Reece each transform familiar subjects into spaces for deeper reflection. From Hulme’s collaborative portraits and first-hand testimonies, to Göncz’s tactile landscapes shaped by material memory, and Reece’s observations of the trials and quirks of everyday life, their practices explore how personal experience, memory, and attention can change the way we see the world around us.
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 Barbara Hulme, Dalma Göncz and Paula Reece, the Artists of the Season featured for AUTUMN 2026.
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Each artist approaches subject, material, and lived experience from a distinct perspective, from intimate portraits that place testimony and self-representation at the centre, to tactile landscapes shaped by memory and transformation, and figurative paintings that elevate the trials and quirks of everyday life — offering three compelling perspectives on contemporary practice.
Artist of the Season - Autumn 2026
Barbara Hulme - Mixed Media Portrait Painting - UK
Portraiture, Testimony and the Reclamation of Visibility
Artist of the Season Winner Barbara Hulme’s intimate portrait practice places people and their stories at its centre. For more than four decades, Hulme has been drawn to the human figure and its complexity; for the past five years, she has focused particularly on disabled subjects, creating work that challenges who gets to represent disability, and who gets to speak about it.
©Barbara Hulme, All Rights Reserved Top Left to Right: Jennifer Dunstan (2024); Mik Scarlett Wallace (2026)
Bottom Left to Right: Michael (Jimmy Mac) (2024); Gaelle Chassery (2023)
Working primarily with watercolour, alongside coloured pencil and occasional gold ink, Hulme creates detailed and finely observed portraits. Her practice has developed over four decades, drawing on a long-standing interest in portraiture, life drawing and the human figure.
Hulme's approach is collaborative, in which portraiture becomes a vehicle for visibility, testimony and self-representation. Her sitters choose the photographs from which their portraits are developed and contribute their own stories, thus allowing them a degree of authorship over both their image and the narrative accompanying it. For Hulme, the portrait alone is not enough. The words give each collaborator a further presence, allowing them to complicate the image and to articulate an experience that cannot be fully communicated through representation alone. The resulting portraits therefore become more than depictions of a person: they are encounters shaped by agency, lived experience and the right to be seen on one's own terms.
I paint intimate portraits of disabled people and share their stories in their own words, because too many times, others speak for us and we are not listened to or heard ourselves.
Her recent Women’s Health and Men’s Health series demonstrate the emotional breadth of this approach. The portraits are not intended to reduce their subjects to their diagnoses or circumstances. Instead, the accompanying testimonies reveal lives marked by difficulty, but also by humour, family, love, ambition, survival and self-determination.
In Jennifer Dunstan (2024), Hulme presents a life shaped by bipolar disorder, autism, hearing loss, PTSD and the effects of domestic abuse, alongside the profound relationships that have sustained her. Dunstan’s story moves from a difficult adolescence and years of substance abuse towards motherhood, grandmotherhood and a renewed sense of identity. Her admiration for Frida Kahlo — for her honesty, resilience and refusal to accept imposed limitations — becomes part of her own story of self-acceptance.
In Mik Scarlett Wallace (2026), Hulme portrays a man whose public life has involved music, television, journalism and disability advocacy. His testimony moves between the constructed personas required by public life and a more intimate understanding of himself: a man from Luton who grew up surrounded by family and friends, moved to London in pursuit of his ambitions, found love and built a life he could not have imagined as a disabled child in the 1960s and 70s. His story reflects Hulme’s wider interest in showing disability not as a single defining identity, but as one part of a full and individual life.
Michael (Jimmy Mac) (2024) offers a markedly different perspective. His account of contracting polio as a child speaks candidly about stigma, anger, alcoholism, isolation and the long psychological aftermath of living with an impairment. His dark humour and refusal to sentimentalise his experience are as significant as the hardships he describes. The portrait becomes a meeting point between vulnerability and defiance.
Gaelle Chassery (2023) brings another dimension to the series, articulating the experience of living with invisible illnesses and disabilities. For Chassery, art and nature offer a way of reconnecting with a sense of expansiveness and possibility in the face of chronic limitation and misunderstanding. Her testimony captures something central to Hulme’s practice: the possibility of seeing a person beyond the assumptions attached to their condition.
Hulme's practice was not built without difficulty. After studying art and illustration, she stepped away from formal education because of agoraphobia, depression and anxiety, before returning to her practice through adult education and life drawing. During lockdown, daily drawing and online life-drawing sessions re-established a sustained relationship with it. The portrait remained the constant: a way of paying attention to people and finding beauty in their individuality.
Hulme's work asks us to look beyond assumptions and encounter the individual first. Through portraiture, testimony and collaboration, she creates space for people to define their own image and narrative. In doing so, her paintings become records not only of appearance, but of humanity, resilience and self-representation.
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Artist of the Season Autumn 2026
Dalma Göncz - Mixed Media Landscape Painting - Hungary/UK
Where Landscape becomes Memory
Artist of the Season Winner Dalma Göncz is a Hungarian contemporary artist based in London whose multidisciplinary practice explores the relationship between landscape, memory, time and material transformation. Working across painting, sculpture and textile-based processes, she creates richly layered works using oil, acrylic, reclaimed industrial glass beads, recycled paper pulp and mixed media, in which painting becomes tactile, physical and deeply connected to the act of making.
©Dalma Göncz, Mixed Media Painting, All Rights Reserved
At the heart of Göncz's practice is an exploration of how landscape can hold memory. Thousands of hand-stitched beads and carefully constructed surfaces turn repetitive gestures into visible records of time, attention and care. For Göncz, materials are not simply elements within a composition; they carry traces of previous lives, histories and use.
Her attraction to imperfect and reclaimed materials is central to this process. Their irregularities become part of the work rather than flaws to be concealed. Through combining painting, embroidery, drawing and sculpture, she challenges conventional boundaries between disciplines while considering how materials can accumulate emotional and physical memory.
Her landscapes emerge through this accumulation of material and gesture, sitting between painting and object. Light, movement and proximity are integral to the experience of each piece. As viewers move around the work, surfaces shift, and details emerge, revealing layers that may initially remain unseen. The works therefore ask for a slower form of looking, one attentive to texture, repetition and the subtle changes produced by light and perspective.
Rather than depicting transformation, my work embodies it.
For Göncz, landscape is never simply something to represent. It is a site where material, memory and time converge: built through repeated gesture, held in tactile surfaces, and experienced differently with every encounter.
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Artist of the Season Winner Autumn 2026
Paula Reece - Mixed Media Figurative Painting - UK
A Celebration of the Mundane
Artist of the Season Winner Paula Reece creates figurative paintings that transform ordinary moments into something meaningful. Through drawing, composition, colour and storytelling, she explores the quiet trials, quirks and subtle beauty of everyday life, often with a thread of social commentary running beneath the surface.
©Paula Reece, Giclee Prints, All Rights Reserved
From Left to Right: Between the Pages; The First Request of the Day; The Importance of Being Idle
On New Year's Eve 2025, after more than 25 years working as an illustrator and designer, Reece entered the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026, a long-held ambition. The framed print The Importance of Being Idle sold all 50 editions immediately. It was a work rooted in something deliberately ordinary: the value of slowing down, of allowing space for idleness. The response confirmed what Paula had always sensed: that the everyday, looked at closely enough, carries its own significance.
That return to her personal practice has shaped everything since.
Reece's process begins with an idea, developed through sketches, observation and photographs before returning to the studio to experiment with composition and colour. Working across acrylics, watercolours, inks, pastels and pencils, she allows each work to evolve through a combination of instinct, mark-making and visual storytelling. Her paintings find meaning in moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed, the overlooked, the habitual, the quietly absurd.
Each piece in my print collection is a celebration of the mundane, elevated through colour and story.
For Reece, making and sharing a finished work is itself an act of meaning. Her growing body of work continues to find significance in the fabric of daily life, not by dramatising it, but by looking at it more carefully than most of us do. A celebration of the mundane, in every sense.
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Discover more artists featured in previous Artist of the Season editions
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