By Beatriz Perez, Co-founder of ART from HEART CIC
@beatrizperezphotography
Assunta Miles 'Waste to Wonder'. Image courtesy of ART from Heart.
As artists, Judit Prieto and I are passionate when it comes to Nature and Women, encompassing both their splendour and challenges. Determined to address these themes, we merged our creative and commercial experiences in 2019 to co-found ART from HEART CIC, a platform that advocates and engages fellow artists and audiences through activism. We do this by supporting multimedia artists that are actively responding to these themes through their creative practices. Judit and I aim to build a community of artivists that inspire, create awareness, and have a positive impact. We create opportunities for Artists to get featured, exhibit, promote, sell, and raise their Artist Profile & visibility.
ART from HEART's most recent Exhibition TERRA at Espacio Gallery featured 47 artists responding to the theme by paying tribute to Earth’s infinite beauty, reflecting on the destruction of nature by human intervention or inspiring us to make changes towards more sustainable and harmonious ways of living in unison with the environment. The curatorial vision for this exhibition presented a fantastic collection of 91 artworks with outstanding synergy, embraced by the audience. Ana Ortiz and Assunta Miles are two artists who participated in TERRA and responded to climate change with their work.
Instal image of TERRA, ART from HEART Exhibition at Espacio Gallery, London, UK. Image courtesy of ART from Heart.
Ana Ortiz's work is predominantly inspired by her annual summer visits to the picturesque region of North Spain, and its beautiful coastline. Ortiz’s work reflects the vibrant blue colours and black sand found in the shallow rock pools of the Galician coastline, captured in an aerial viewpoint. Ortiz’s long-term love affair with the sea has been represented through the artist's original experiments in a textured mixed media painting, which combined acrylic and resin with sand, shells, and coral from the region.
Assunta Miles is a contemporary stitch artist and designer, exploring a forgotten lace making technique developed in the 19th Century. Taking inspiration from the symbiotic relationship and transformative process that takes place in the formation of lichen, food packaging and thread, evolving into a mutually beneficial union. The paper supports the lace threads, and in return, the lace transforms the wastepaper. Miles hopes to communicate that waste has the potential to be reused and can be beautifully transformed without further damaging the planet. The lichen forms meander across a discarded framed image. By adapting our thinking and reusing, we enable our planet to thrive, and in return, reshape our future.
Artist visibility is key for success. At ART from HEART, we invite artists to be part of our Artivist community and think about purpose beyond pure visual pleasure. We advise artists to embrace every opportunities to showcase, promote, and sell their work with an open mind. From our experience, you should consider the following to achieve these outcomes:
Think beyond the “white cube” and look at alternative spaces.
Give a distinctive visual identity to your Exhibition.
Write and send a well-crafted press release to galleries, curators, collectors, blogs, magazines, local newspapers, podcasts, etc.
Create artworks that engage with contemporary issues as these appeal to galleries, curators, and collectors.
Be bold and contextualise or re-contextualise your work as needed, within reason. Forcing your work to fit a theme just to benefit from an opportunity would hurt more than aid.
Find creative ways to be part of the conversation, for example, pledging a percentage of sales to support a cause that speaks to you. (Fun fact! ART from HEART has planted 193 trees, and counting, on behalf of the Artists Community to aid the Amazon reforestation programme).
If any of these topics resonate with you and you would like to learn more, Judit and I are happy to welcome you to ART from HEART’s Community and support you. Join Us!
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