Minna George

Desert Orchid, Mixed media on Canvas, 100x100 cm

Portfolio: www.solartis.co.uk

"... home has now become state of mind and stability everywhere I find myself to be."

Artist Statement

My career as visual artist started with a classical and traditional approach to drawing and painting. Having been born in Ethiopia, spent my childhood in Bulgaria and adulthood to date in London, England my art practice developed with all the travels and changes in my life. I have now found myself using a range of mediums to help support the variety of subject matters that concern me as an artist today.

I find the ability to speak different visual languages exciting and it allows me to have the freedom of expression I need in my work. The idea of “Home” has always been a very broad term in my life, as I was raised as a citizen of the world; home has now become state of mind and stability everywhere I find myself to be.

In my paintings, photographs and films, I tend to explore different subjects ranging from extreme weather conditions to humour to chemical reactions. I tend to use drawing and photography as a reference to a memory or a place that may trigger a series of new paintings. However, my paintings are not necessarily object or scenery representations; they tend to express a state of being with a reference to a past experience. I choose to make my own mediums I paint with in order to achieve the right intensity of colour I need for each specific layer I apply on the canvas.


Education:

1995 - 2000 – National School for Fine Art– Sofia, Bulgaria
2000 - 2003 – BA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art - London, UK
2010 - 2011 – MA Film and European Art Practice (with distinction), Kingston University – London, UK

Tina Mammoser

Portfolio: www.tina-m.com
Blog Post: Home Sweet Home...

Home is more than a place. Home is a sense of belonging. So I've travelled and even emigrated to find those places. I'm most grounded, most myself, when seeing something overwhelming - sea, cliff, stars. It makes me feel small but very real. So the places in my paintings were each home for a moment.

Home for me has always been change. Growing up my family moved often, so no single place is even my childhood home. This seems to have led to a roaming desire. From my youth I wanted to go to Britain - for no tangible reason but idealistic visions of that world. (and reading too much Shakespeare) As a young woman it never occured to me not to travel where I wanted and alone. My very first "grown up" vacation was to Scotland. Without question, I knew instinctively it was where I belonged. So I returned to study and stay.

Still, home to me isn't a single location. I've never met the social expectations of finding a single place to live, settling down, or even being homesick for Chicago and my family. In this age of technology my family is with me all the time. I can speak to my mom from a clifftop on the Isle of Portland, or text-chat with my brother from a caravan in Yorkshire.

So having found my home - an entire island country - I'm still compelled to move around, to travel, to explore. Because home is more than the place. Home is the sense of belonging, the way a place makes me feel real. And I feel most grounded, most myself, when witnessing something awe inspiring and overwhelming. It makes me feel small but very real. And that is what my art is about - those moments and places where the world is too large, and being so large it embraces. Taking that light and colour of the place and putting the sensation into a painting that connects individually. Bringing you to where I was.

Because the places in each of my paintings was home for a moment.

Malika Sqalli

CoffinBay - at 34.02 - Self portrait with Mosaic, Malika Sqalli

Portfolio: Latitude 34 Project

"I surrendered the luxury of having a home to explore the concept of home, by going to the other side of the world to find the connection and the sense of belonging inherent to our culture and identity"

Malika Sqalli is a multicultural and multilingual artist who uses photography as a medium which shows “reality” in new ways, or, as the great critic John Berger put it, her images are a way of “catching the frame between the frame.” Her photos (she also uses mixed media and animation) are a way of asking questions about the world and inspiring people with visual answers. Her photos are at once a form of international communication, full of anthropological, geographic, and human elements that become part of a visual education.

Born in Morocco, Sqalli moved to France in her teens and attended the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Montpelier. She then spent several years living in London, and since 2010 she has divided her time between London, Rabat, Los Angeles, and the various places she has journeyed to along Latitude 34, both North and South, in order to complete her current project. Malika has shown her work on four continents -- in North America (Atlanta), in Europe (France, Austria and the UK), Africa (Morocco ), and East Asia (Korea). At several shows, her work has been singled out for awards or honourable mentions.

Latitude 34, Malika Sqalli’s current undertaking, is a very smart conceptual art project that grew out of a personal moment of recognition. In 2010, when she first visited Los Angeles, Malika found that for all the cultural differences between her home town, Rabat, Morocco, and L.A, there were also great commonalities. Seeking to find out why, she learned that both places sit astride the 34 parallel North. Seized by the unlikelihood, even romance of the idea, she decided to explore and photograph the human sites and sights along that imaginary demarcation line around the globe in order to see and share what she could learn about the similarities and differences in human cultures. For Malika this is not just a project about the beauty of the places along the parallels, but an exploration undertaken with a camera and fueled by her “child’s eye” view of the world, a view which works against parochialism and in favour of cultural globalisation.

Stunning are the parallels between disparate locations, parallels which the artist occasionally emphasises by including within a frame two or three images from different countries which work to underline similarities and / or differences in how we view and utilise the environment – the desert in Morocco and California, the seaside in Japan, China, and California; mountains in Morocco, China, Japan. Sometimes Malika shows up herself as a small personal note within the larger images derived from her far flung travels. She addresses addresses that connections and disconnections: what links us, relates to us and also what is far away, different and mysterious and investigate and question the notion of home, culture identity and the notion of non place. She asks herself, "is home a physical place? in the emotions? the logical mind? about geography history and ancestry?