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10 International Artists
Finding common ground in a fragmented world
Birute Nomeda Stankuniene
Birute Nomeda Stankuniene
Birutė Nomeda Stankunienė (b. 1963) is a Lithuanian artist based in Vilnius. After a career in engineering, she shifted entirely to art, graduating from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2009 and later studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, residencies in Spain, and the Contemporary Art Academy. She has exhibited in over thirty shows, with notable presentations in London and Florence, often represented by the Italian gallery Immaginaria at ARTVILNIUS. Her work appears on Saatchi Art, in IUOMA and Slow Art Day publications, and in international media. Her paintings are held in private collections worldwide.
Statement
I describe my practice as Existential Movement — abstract gestures shaped by emotion, memory, and the resilience of the human psyche. Influenced by psychoanalysis, physics, and mathematics, I use color fields, textured strokes, and linear marks to create distilled visual “formulas” of inner states.
Working across canvas, paper, and experimental materials, I explore how abstraction can hold experiences of challenge, recovery, and transformation. My titles act as bridges, guiding viewers into the emotional terrain of each work.
Gillian Brett
Gillian Brett
A graduate from Brighton Art School and The Art Academy, London, Gillian has exhibited widely in the UK, most notably with ING Discerning Eye, Women In Art Fair, Wales Contemporary and the Affordable Art Fair. She has completed both public and private commissions, most notably a bronze commemorating suffragist Fanny Wilkinson, the UK’s first female professional landscape designer. A member of ArtCan, Gillian’s studio is a Grade 1 listed potting shed in the grounds of the iconic Chiswick House.
Statement
“My sculptures celebrate the uncelebrated. Real people, individuals who have a sense of themselves, developing resilience by facing the challenges we all meet in life.
I work from life, whenever possible sculpting individuals in the space with me. I work fast, sketching in clay, without measurement. This results in textures that feel more alive to me than a perfect reproduction.
I enjoy experimenting with materials, traditional and unorthodox. I’m excited by the inherent jeopardy in firing my work as ceramic, often enjoying the unexpected: the ‘happy accident’. My textures echo the natural world drawing parallels between geological processes such as erosion and the human journey through life.
Human life is my inspiration. In today’s world it is too easy to focus on our differences: my work aims to be a reminder of what we all share. Our humanity: no matter our gender, skin colour, position in life: we share being human.”
Jane Glynn
Jane Glynn
I am an award-winning printmaker who has exhibited in the UK & Europe on topics such as heterotopic space & archives, liminality & war and landscape & memory.
Statement
I’m an artist that makes fine art prints, photographs, drawings and paintings using a small archive of found film as source material. The films are primarily from the 1940s–1970s during the golden age of utopic aspirations in architecture and air travel: Brasilia was planned in the formation of an airplane; the World Trade fairs were at their height and post-war Europe was booming. Finding a message-in-a-bottle thrown off a container ship on its way from Denmark to Greenland piqued an interest in travel not being about the destination but about the journey itself.
Pre-pandemic archival interaction was journeying within the archive to try to identify places that people had visited and visit them myself so as to gain a contemporary perspective. Pandemic online drawing-from-film sessions have now led to archive engagement in a new joyful way. I like to think that I am journeying through memory, space, place and time in my small archival world.
Marc Renshaw
Marc Renshaw
Based in Lincolnshire, Marc is an established artist whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK and internationally for more than three decades.
StatementMarc’s practice explores non-places and transitional zones, reflecting a long-standing interest in spaces of passage and impermanence. As a digital artist for whom drawing remains a pivotal element, Marc investigates the relationship between drawing and its broader role as an autobiographical tool for communication—one that captures memory and resonates on an intuitive, emotional level.I'm interested in self perpetuity and relentlessness; the broken record with a repetitive sensibility. It's a selfish indulgence to crack the 'same old joke' that was perhaps never really funny in the first place. I find it gratifying to blur the border between humour and sincerity, and to recycle a pun doggedly; devoid of irony and indiscriminately unheeding towards the passage of time or circumstance.
StatementMarc’s practice explores non-places and transitional zones, reflecting a long-standing interest in spaces of passage and impermanence. As a digital artist for whom drawing remains a pivotal element, Marc investigates the relationship between drawing and its broader role as an autobiographical tool for communication—one that captures memory and resonates on an intuitive, emotional level.I'm interested in self perpetuity and relentlessness; the broken record with a repetitive sensibility. It's a selfish indulgence to crack the 'same old joke' that was perhaps never really funny in the first place. I find it gratifying to blur the border between humour and sincerity, and to recycle a pun doggedly; devoid of irony and indiscriminately unheeding towards the passage of time or circumstance.
Peter Monkman
Peter Monkman
Monkman is half Danish, brought up in County Durham and currently works in York, UK. He studied art at Lancaster University, John Moores Liverpool and UCL London. Monkman has exhibited widely and is in a variety of public and private collections including the National Portrait Gallery London.
Statement
Monkman came to prominence in the late 90s with his abstract and figurative works which tracked his everyday life in the form of fields of automatic drawing and painting. Subsequent artworks reveal layers of automatic drawing which suggests processes such as thoughts and memory deriving from sensation. A conversation, an interaction with a pet dog and the pain from a tooth ache may be the starting point to explore a connection with the subject.
Drawing and painting has underpinned all work with an increasing focus on portraiture. Since winning the BP Portrait Award in 2009 with a depiction of his 12 year old daughter as ‘The Changeling’. Monkman has always been interested in how appearances can be captured suggesting more complex notions of identity. In the last few years the Changeling concept has been extended in the doppelgänger series depicting a child meeting their double as a reflection, making reference to the digital screen that blur distinction between fiction and reality in a new world of scrolling and avatars.
Renate Maas
Renate Maas
Statement
I make small, colorful and surrealistic images and soft sculptures. These pieces reflect the patriarchal view of women and other animals as objects, while considering their subsequent treatment, and the relationship that exists between the two. My work addresses the inconsistencies in their existence and makes viewers aware of the injustices, constraints, and exploitations that happen to living beings because of their gender or species. My artistic research is based on feminist perspectives, which have traditionally been dismissed and disregarded.
The images and objects are parallel expressions for me, but they inspire each other. Figurative elements that emerge in my multi-layered and multi-perspective drawings and paintings are developed further into sculptures, which in turn inspire my two-dimensional work and lead to derivatives or descendants. I stitch and sew the sculptures from used fabric and other materials that I have at hand, or that come into my possession accidentally.
The process, materials, techniques, and sizes reflect upon feminine traditions and roles that have often been disregarded as craft in the art world. These pieces reveal and protest the instrumentalization of female bodies in a patriarchal society and the dilemmas of female life. The figures have their own narrative, which I explore and visualize in photographs and gives a voice to the unheard.
The devaluation of women and animals often shows itself through bodily restrictions and infringements, as well as spatial containment within the home or farm. My works similarly reflect restrictive spatial aspects. They are ambiguous and can unfold different shapes and meanings depending on their or the viewer’s position.
I am based in Hamburg, Germany, and hold Master degrees and a PhD in Fine Art, Art History and Philosophy, and further qualifications in Education and Business. My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is represented in private collections.
For more information follow me on Instagram renatemaas_artist and visit my website renatemaas.com.
Sarmed Mirza
Sarmed Mirza
Sarmed Mirza is an award winning Glasgow based multidisciplinary artist, author and filmmaker whose work moves between abstraction and realism to examine perception, emotional ecology, and the quiet futures hidden inside crisis. His practice spans micro-paintings, large-scale drawings, and narrative projects rooted in attention, memory, and lived experience. Sarmed has exhibited with the Scottish Portrait Awards, Paisley Art Institute, and reached the 2nd stage of John Moores prize in 2025. His work invites slow looking and proposes new ways of sensing connection in a fragmented world.
Statement
My work centres on Zero Ground: the moment perception resets and something truer begins. Whether through impasto micro-lifeforms or the illustrated Handshake series, I explore how tension, care, and uncertainty coexist. These forms are not symbols but proposals for how we might pay attention again. Through repetition, intimacy, and scale, I examine how new emotional ecologies emerge when old structures break, and how small gestures can carry the weight of collapse and possibility.
Susan E. Wilson
Susan E. Wilson
Susan E. Wilson explores abstraction as a means of conveying ideas, emotions and lived experience. Based in Sutherland, Scotland, her widely exhibited work is held in private collections across the UK and internationally.
Statement
A passionate belief in the power of the arts to effect personal and social change, has shaped my long career as an artist in my personal creative practice, through collaborative work and as an arts educator or facilitator of participatory and collaborative arts opportunities. My own individual practice is an iterative, learning process explored through the physical handling of materials, to reveal the sensory possibilities of each medium. I interpret my own physical journeys through the lens of social geography: integrating feminism, mapping, history and myth, to illuminate contemporary issues through abstract painting, collage and drawing.
Website https://susanelizabethwilson.com/
Email Artinfo@susanelizabethwilson.com
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/susan_e_wilson
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SusanElizabethWilson
Tina Roe
Tina Roe
After working and raising two children in England, Tina recently graduated as a mature student of fine art, winning the Sculpture Prize for her year.
Statement
Inspired by female philosophers, in particular the works of Elaine Scarry and Hannah Arendt, Tina uses materials to explore the irredeemable fragility of human nature that, nonetheless, can overcome life’s burdens, work in harmony with others and find new beginnings. The concept of home is integral to Tina’s work but instead of focusing on the architectural materiality of a house, her work reflects intangibles such as memory, humour, identity and family histories, using materials to tell a story.
Statement
Inspired by female philosophers, in particular the works of Elaine Scarry and Hannah Arendt, Tina uses materials to explore the irredeemable fragility of human nature that, nonetheless, can overcome life’s burdens, work in harmony with others and find new beginnings. The concept of home is integral to Tina’s work but instead of focusing on the architectural materiality of a house, her work reflects intangibles such as memory, humour, identity and family histories, using materials to tell a story.
Valissa Butterworth
Valissa Butterworth
Residing in North East Victoria, Valissa Butterworth creates works that explore Quantum Science evidence telling us we emit an energy frequency connecting us to a universal energy field, one we can influence through our presence.
The act of thinking, believing, conceiving of an idea/action combined with our energetic frequency creates individual outcomes.
Using transformational materials in conjunction with Vivid colour and light she creates experimental sculptural works that capture these energetic shifts in space and projects them back to us exposing existential spaces that would otherwise be overlooked in our race to do life.
In slowing down, finding evidence to support her belief that we are co-creators of our world, she challenges us to look beyond what is.
Multiple exhibitions locally and internationally with various works documented in Thames and Hudson publications, Valissa established a career in Lighting and object design that includes numerous shortlists and awards for excellence across ceramics and glass, before completing a Masters in Fine art in 2021.
Post MFA education programs with the Contemporary Art academy in London continue to expand her thinking.
StatementLocated in regional Victoria my practice is concerned with space(s), the invisible energy within them, our ability affect it and the matter around it. These existential spaces, between knowing, thinking and being are found with chaotic chemical reactions in transformative materials.
Resin, wax, ceramic and plastic capture, solidify and manipulate invisible energy in motion, chemical heat burns plastic space, melts wax, slumps particles, expanding, contracting, colouring.
Experimental sculpture and projection works test our ability to influence outcomes through energetic presence referencing light and space artists use of architectural space and light as material to stretch perceptions.
Time is woven through abstract disordered layers at once past present and future. ‘between spaces’ emerge through reflected and refracted light. Genres collide, alterring the narrative, colour invades once forbidden planes where a ‘what if’ approach is favoured over meticulous planning, slowing down to find undocumented spaces.
Outcomes range from physically complex arrangements of space requiring close inspection, painted/sculpted mattering that meets us on a human scale to projected works that immerse us in their vastness.
The act of thinking, believing, conceiving of an idea/action combined with our energetic frequency creates individual outcomes.
Using transformational materials in conjunction with Vivid colour and light she creates experimental sculptural works that capture these energetic shifts in space and projects them back to us exposing existential spaces that would otherwise be overlooked in our race to do life.
In slowing down, finding evidence to support her belief that we are co-creators of our world, she challenges us to look beyond what is.
Multiple exhibitions locally and internationally with various works documented in Thames and Hudson publications, Valissa established a career in Lighting and object design that includes numerous shortlists and awards for excellence across ceramics and glass, before completing a Masters in Fine art in 2021.
Post MFA education programs with the Contemporary Art academy in London continue to expand her thinking.
StatementLocated in regional Victoria my practice is concerned with space(s), the invisible energy within them, our ability affect it and the matter around it. These existential spaces, between knowing, thinking and being are found with chaotic chemical reactions in transformative materials.
Resin, wax, ceramic and plastic capture, solidify and manipulate invisible energy in motion, chemical heat burns plastic space, melts wax, slumps particles, expanding, contracting, colouring.
Experimental sculpture and projection works test our ability to influence outcomes through energetic presence referencing light and space artists use of architectural space and light as material to stretch perceptions.
Time is woven through abstract disordered layers at once past present and future. ‘between spaces’ emerge through reflected and refracted light. Genres collide, alterring the narrative, colour invades once forbidden planes where a ‘what if’ approach is favoured over meticulous planning, slowing down to find undocumented spaces.
Outcomes range from physically complex arrangements of space requiring close inspection, painted/sculpted mattering that meets us on a human scale to projected works that immerse us in their vastness.
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