Paola Minekov

Portfolio: www.paolaminekov.com

To read more about my experience, while curating Home, please visit my blog.

Ballet Repose, Paola Minekov

Following my exhibition Power and Passion last year, the Bulgarian Cultural Institute (BCI) in London invited me to return for a solo show this October.

While this was an attractive proposition, I felt it was a great opportunity to curate a group exhibition of international women artists with links to the UK, and with a theme which is very close to my heart - Home. The Director of BCI, Svetla Dionissieva, was extremely supportive of the idea and so Home: Contemporary Female Masters was born.

I left my native Bulgaria at the age of 18 and have since lived in Israel, the Netherlands and the USA before moving to London in 2008.

In the last 15 years or so, I have often asked myself where I belong and what does Home really mean to me. I have lived out of a suitcase, moved to a different flat, city or country every year. I have opened and closed many doors and forgotten more faces and memories than I can remember. Yet I am still confronted with each and every choice I've made since the day I left my parents home in 1998, every day. I have painted cityscapes in an attempt capture a moment or an emotion, but I have never before consciously explored the ways in which my circumstances have affected my life as a woman in my artwork.

Since starting to develop the concept of Home, I have had an overwhelmingly positive response, not only from the artists I invited to exhibit and Susan Mumford (founder of Be Smart About Art and the Association of Women Art Dealers - AWAD) who will open the exhibition, but also from numerous other women, working in all fields, who can relate to the experience of establishing themselves and building the elements of what they perceive as 'home' wherever they are in the world.

Diana Ali

Spawn, Diana Ali

Portfolio: dianaali.com

Born in Rusholme, Manchester to Bangladeshi parents, Diana is now based in Nottingham, UK but actively works nationally and internationally taking her curatorial ideas to different countries to challenge the misconceptions of belonging. Her medium involves fictional writing, drawing, photography and a play on the textual. She is interested in correspondence, networking, collaboration and connectivity in her practice and her research explores the relationship between the un-met and the meeting. Her curatorial projects are an extension of this where she explores artists responses from the local to the global.

The work shown in the exhibition considers displacement and temporary disengagement from our everyday living. Is a ‘home’ permanent or do we have ideals of what the home should be so forever searching? By procrastinating and day-dreaming do we have a yearning to disassociate from the monotony of our habitual base doings? And if so, it is not damaging our reality but briefly dislodging it. Multiple images from the everyday have been manipulated, distorted and misconstrued to represent the many ways in which we can have this escapism. Ali has exhibited at the TINAG festival, London and Site Gallery, Sheffield. Her international exhibitions include The Library Artspace, Victoria, Australia, The Crafts Fair in San Francisco, The Roaming Biennial in Tehran and the Other Asia’s exhibition ‘ReDo Pakistan’ in Karachi, Pakistan.

Her curatorial projects include ‘Up & Coming’ at the CUC in Liverpool, an event showcasing 60 emerging national and international artists, ‘Subversive Correspondence’, London and Bristol and ‘Dialogues: A Fake Romance?’ in Swansea. She has recently curated the ‘The State of Un-Play’ in Atelier 35, Bucharest, Romania. Ali is also a lecturer, workshop leader and creative mentor. She has worked in Italy and at Huanghui University in China. She is currently the course leader for the Foundation Diploma at Grantham College and a course author and BA tutor for the Open College of the Arts.

Tamar Lev-On

Portfolio: www.tamarlevon.com

I am a mixed media artist and an architect, living, working and teaching in Tel Aviv. I lived and worked in London for five years, where I finished my MA Fine Art and exhibited my work internationally, including in the previous two Venice Biennials.

Homes, Tamar Lev-On

London life, as a foreigner, an artist and a woman, was a confusing condition that called for identity check. It often made me a cultural chameleon that takes over the surrounding – in order to fit in. 

This was the starting point of Brixton Princess from 2010.

This installation includes a manipulated self-portrait and a video piece, showing me as an Afro-Caribbean braid-haired woman. It discusses my place as a constant visitor: in this city, neighbourhood, culture and religion that are not mine. The portrait is presented in a traditional, almost religious composition, while the film portrays a self inflicted act.

In 2011 I simultaneously worked on two correlating projects, both investigating the artist's identity as influenced by her residence over time.

The film HOMES, a five minutes road-movie, investigates the optional bridging between Israel and London. I am importing nostalgia into reality thus bridging between the worlds. The journey is experienced through a 3-dimentional model of the house I grew up in. It arrives in London on a river, takes a train ride, goes by tube and being carried by me until we reach our new home together, passing well known London landmarks as well as personally significant locations.

Self Portrait with Homes is a hand printed and embroidered wall piece. Images of the houses I used to live in form a repetitive hand printed pattern, used as the background of the piece. The shapes created by the pattern dictate a new, embroidered, road map. The red roads evolve into two halves of a face, together depicting a complete self portrait.

*Brixton Princess first exhibited in London VOX Exhibition, Red Gate Gallery, London.
*HOMES first exhibited in In Bridges: Video Art Exhibition, Susan Dalal Centre and Tavi Art Gallery, Tel-Aviv. Produced with the support of The Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts - Cinema Project with the participation of the Leon Recanati Foundation. Supported by the Cultural Administration, Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport, The Israel Film Council.
*Self Portrait with Homes first exhibited in MARKERS 8: Mapping, ArtLife for the World Gallery, Venice.

Caroline Underwood

Atlas, Caroline Underwood

Portfolio: www.carolineunderwood.com

I was born in London and returned here as an adult, moving here at first to study and then staying for work.  For the first time in my life I feel part of a local community – and how lucky am I for it to be one so rich in culture and diversity.  Throughout my life my family has been scattered across Europe, Africa, America, Australasia.  In between leaving London and coming home, I have travelled. 

My early years spent in Saudi Arabia are a subconscious influence on my work.  Images surface in my dreams.  I navigate streets lined with dusty and homogenous buildings.  I round a corner to be confronted by a vertiginous wall of water, unexpected - the Red Sea.  I do not know for certain if it is real or imagined but the memory of it feeds my practice, intangible and intriguing.

Islamic art and architecture has a visceral impact on me.  It takes me back to a place that I recognise but do not know.  I am increasingly interested in investigating this through my work, but at the same time I sense that this exploration is a longer journey.  In the mean time, I employ fractals, words and number structures borrowed from everyday scenarios to compose meditations on the historical context and emotive power of built spaces and invoke the restorative potential of landscape and nature.

Working in black and white and across disciplines, I draw on a range of painting, printmaking and other processes, combining traditional and experimental techniques and materials.  My approach is informed by research into Philosophical Taoism and East Asian landscape painting theories, as well as ideas about the Sublime and our relationship with space and time.  The work is created in series or as installations, reflecting the way we experience our environment – not just looking at it, but moving through it, being in it. 

And so my work happens as a result of the movements I make, the places I go, the time I spend there.  I spend as much time as I can out and about, being in nature: on boats, on walks; in weather.  Much of my work is inspired by the sea.  The other recurring theme is trees.

The focus of my most recent work is – quite literally – close to home. A year ago I relocated my practice to a studio in my garden, in leafy South East London. I have begun exploring, on a daily basis, the green spaces surrounding my home and studio.  Walking and running, morning and night, in sunshine, snow and mist… I have been collecting visual material both in my head and on my cameraphone since January.  This collection of snapshots – glimpses into the world on my doorstep – has inspired a new series of paintings and prints inspired by the South East London landscape.