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.