Embedded Files
Common Ground Collective's
Inaugural Art Exhibition
at The Tabernacle (Notting Hill)
8 International and Award Winning Artists
8 International and Award Winning Artists
Finding Common Ground in a Fragmented World
Click on the names below for more information
Finding Common Ground in a Fragmented World
Click on the names below for more information
Birute Nomeda Stankuniene
Birute Nomeda Stankuniene
Bio
Birute Nomeda Stankuniene, born in 1963, lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her journey from a technologist and manager in engineering to a full-time professional artist is a testament to her dedication and passion for art. In 2009, she graduated from Vilnius Arts Academy and has since been continually developing her artistic practice by participating in international residencies, including a residency at Slade Art School in 2019 and in Spain in 2020. She attended courses at Slade Summer School from 2017 to 2019 and graduated from the Contemporary Art Academy (2023-2025).
Birute's work has been showcased in over thirty national and international exhibitions, including five in London, UK, and six in Florence, Italy. Her artworks have frequently been presented by the established Italian gallery "Immaginaria" from Florence at the internationally recognised contemporary art fair "ARTVILNIUS." Her art has gained recognition through Saatchi Art Online, has been featured in IUOMA and Slow Art Day publications, and is covered by multiple online blogs and national and international press, including CNC, BBC Radio Solent, LTR, and others.
The book "Seven Feelings according to the Book of Job" was published, focusing solely on the artist's painting series and design.
Birute's artworks have found homes in the collections of art lovers from a diverse range of countries, including Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Italy, the UK, Brazil, and the USA.
She is also a member of the international projects "Art Without Borders," "Slow Art Day," "Jheronimus Bosch Plaza", and "Common Ground Collective".
Artist Statement
I am abstract artist Birutė Nomeda Stankūnienė. If I were to describe my art in two words, it would be "EXISTENTIAL MOVEMENT."
My artistic journey ultimately brought me to abstract painting and psychoanalysis. The principles of physics and mathematics continue to strongly influence my work. During my studies, I discovered that through abstract, generalized lines and colorful forms, I could express emotions, states, personal experiences, and events, much like a physicist might describe an ongoing phenomenon with a summarizing formula.
Currently, my artistic formulas take the form of abstract gesture paintings, with my chosen mediums including canvas, paper, oil, acrylic, and various other materials. In my works I use both a wide thin field of paint and color and an intense, thick brush stroke, combining them with each other and with a pastel and pencil line.
I am particularly interested in the possibilities and sometimes metaphysical strength of humanity to recover from trauma, overcome challenges, and flourish once again. These themes are prevalent in my works, which is why the titles of my paintings hold significant importance for me; they serve as a bridge between the viewer and my art.
After attending the Slade Summer School I began to experiment more with materials and canvas formats, creating works on both large and small canvases. I also started developing installations and collages, integrating painting into these new forms.
At this moment, I remain eager to explore the best ways to respond to the questions that concern me through my creativity, as well as the means to resolve them.
Gillian Brett
Gillian Brett
Bio
Gillian Brett is an award winning figurative sculptor based in Chiswick. Gillian enjoys working from life, sculpting in clay. Completed pieces are fired to ceramic and finished with glazes or oxides, or cast in resin or bronze.
A member of ArtCan, Gillian’s work has been exhibited widely, most notably at Wales Contemporary, ING Discerning Eye, the Affordable Art Fair. A selection is on display at Skylark Galleries on London’s South Bank.
Gillian is currently working on a public commission for Coronation Gardens in Southfields to commemorate Fanny Rollo Wilkinson one of the first women in the UK to have a professional career. Wilkinson qualified as a landscape designer, planned and oversaw the planting/installation of 75 London parks and gardens. The sculpture, in bronze, is to be publicly unveiled in July 2025.
Gillian’s work is held in private collections in the UK, US and UAE and she is open to discussing private commissions. Please contact gbsculpt1@gmail.com and follow on Instagram @gillian.brett.
Artist StatementMy sculptures are about celebrating the uncelebrated. Real people, doing real things. Individuals who have a sense of themselves, developing resilience by facing the challenges we all meet in life.
My bronze commemorating suffragist Fanny Wilkinson celebrates her achievements: bringing green spaces and fresh water to everyday Londoners at the turn of the century.
Working ‘from 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. Of our humanity. No matter our gender, skin colour, position in life: we are all human.
Peter Monkman
Peter Monkman
Bio
Monkman is an award winning figurative artist who came to prominence in the late 90s with his 'domestic doodles' which tracked his everyday life as a teacher, young father and consumer of movies in the form of fields of automatic drawing and painting.
Since winning the BP Portrait Award in 2009 with a depiction of his 12 year old daughter as ‘The Changeling’, Monkman has been interested in how appearances can be captured, revealing more complex notions of identity.
To expand on this concept, a series of ethereal paintings based on his autistic nephew provided a challenge to how such an ungraspable internal life can be depicted.
Context and art history have been important to Monkman's painting. In the series 'Face Value', portraits of school age children from UK Private and State schools have been exhibited together to explore how identities of 'youth' can be viewed equally.
Concepts of mind, perception and sensation have informed much of Monkman's experimentation in a range of media. Automatic mono-prints and mark-making provide a surface to allow features to emerge. A carefully observed portrait may be layered with further marks, doodles, erasures and glazes creating a dialogue between the form and meaning.
As a child Monkman was influenced and liberated by punk growing up in Co. Durham and along with regular visits to his mother's hometown Aarhus, Denmark, he was explosed to the freedom of Scandinavian expression and abstraction. The CoBrA group of artists such as Asger Jorn and Karl Appel have recently been a reference in more abstract spontaneous work.
Throughout his career Monkman has run numerous Art trips to New York, LA and London absorbing influences from the YBAs in the early 90s to more current trends in contemporary art informing practice.
An interest in the wide variety of contemporary and historical art has provided a diverse mixing pot to draw from when discovering his own creative direction with a first exhibition in 1996 his journey continues.
Renate Maas
Renate Maas
Artist 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
Bio
Sarmed Mirza is a British-Pakistani visual artist and writer whose work explores the fragile rituals of connection, identity, memory, and the absurdities of modern masculinity. Working in ink, words, and silence, he turns personal history and political noise into quiet, subversive images. A former student of the Contemporary Art Academy’s Programme 4, Mirza's work straddles autobiography and myth, dark humour and grief.
In 2025, he was awarded the Paisley Art Institute Prize for a work from his Monument Valley series. The Handshake: Zero Ground marks his first solo presentation in London, merging visual repetition with raw, poetic text in a powerful book-object that complements the exhibited metal prints.
He lives between Glasgow and inner exile.
Website | Instagram: @sarmed.m.art
Statement
What does a handshake mean now?
This series began as a single drawing: two hands, barbed wire between them. A gesture of peace wrapped in tension. I kept redrawing it, obsessively, as if repeating the moment could change its meaning. But each time it revealed something else—a failed treaty, a memory glitch, a performance of trust in a world that no longer deserves it.
I was born in Pakistan. I live in the UK. My partner is Indian. That quiet fact carries decades of conflict and compromise, often present in the silences around our dinner table. The handshake is no longer just symbolic. It’s personal. Domestic. Historical. I’ve had to negotiate it with neighbours, friends, strangers, family, and with myself.
This exhibition presents eight variations of that same image, printed on metal: clean, precise, industrial. Alongside them is a book of short texts—raw fragments, contradictions, memories that don’t resolve. They speak of fathers, daughters, fake laughter, board games, plant resurrection and volcanic exits. It’s not a memoir. It’s a set of emotional artefacts.
We are not at Ground Zero, the place of explosion.
We are at Zero Ground, the moment just before—or just after. The pause where something might still be possible.
This is not a resolution. It’s a holding gesture.
A question, repeated.
A handshake, offered again.
Susan E. Wilson
Susan E. Wilson
Bio
Susan E Wilson graduated from art school in 1978 with a BA (Hons) Fine Art.
A passionate belief in the power of the arts to effect social change, led to a long career encompassing art education, participatory, community and collaborative arts practice. As Director of a dynamic community arts project, she led the development and build of a bespoke arts venue - North Edinburgh Arts.
A feminist from her early teens, her degree dissertation explored how the women represented in ancient myths illuminate contemporary life and this interest continues to provide a framework for her exploration of abstract painting as a vehicle to convey ideas, emotions and experiences.
A member of The Society of Scottish Artists and Visual Arts Scotland, Susan has exhibited widely and has work in private collections across the UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia and the US.
More information is available on Susan’s website https://susanelizabethwilson.com/ and she can be contacted by email Artinfo@susanelizabethwilson.comor follow her on IG @Susan_e_Wilson
Artist StatementWhilst exploring the possibilities of abstraction to convey an idea, my art-making is a journey, an iterative process of discovery: where colour, mark-making and shape create a visual record of a memory, an impression of place, emotion or subject.
Drawing, photography and collage are all important ways to record my impressions and build up a visual lexicon to work from. I employ a range of materials and techniques to build up or erase the layers within a painting, which is key to creating opportunities for images to emerge, disappear and resurface.
A passion for navigating my way whilst I journey: walking, driving or sailing; reading nautical charts and maps influence aspects of my practice, as does my curiosity about the stories of the places I have visited – both imagined and real.
My paintings are inspired by my memories of these places, their land and seascape, history and mythologies.
Susan E Wilson graduated from art school in 1978 with a BA (Hons) Fine Art.
A passionate belief in the power of the arts to effect social change, led to a long career encompassing art education, participatory, community and collaborative arts practice. As Director of a dynamic community arts project, she led the development and build of a bespoke arts venue - North Edinburgh Arts.
A feminist from her early teens, her degree dissertation explored how the women represented in ancient myths illuminate contemporary life and this interest continues to provide a framework for her exploration of abstract painting as a vehicle to convey ideas, emotions and experiences.
A member of The Society of Scottish Artists and Visual Arts Scotland, Susan has exhibited widely and has work in private collections across the UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia and the US.
More information is available on Susan’s website https://susanelizabethwilson.com/ and she can be contacted by email Artinfo@susanelizabethwilson.comor follow her on IG @Susan_e_Wilson
Artist StatementWhilst exploring the possibilities of abstraction to convey an idea, my art-making is a journey, an iterative process of discovery: where colour, mark-making and shape create a visual record of a memory, an impression of place, emotion or subject.
Drawing, photography and collage are all important ways to record my impressions and build up a visual lexicon to work from. I employ a range of materials and techniques to build up or erase the layers within a painting, which is key to creating opportunities for images to emerge, disappear and resurface.
A passion for navigating my way whilst I journey: walking, driving or sailing; reading nautical charts and maps influence aspects of my practice, as does my curiosity about the stories of the places I have visited – both imagined and real.
My paintings are inspired by my memories of these places, their land and seascape, history and mythologies.
Tina Roe
Tina Roe
Bio
After working and raising two children, Tina recently graduated as a mature student of fine art, winning the Sculpture Prize for her year. 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.
After working and raising two children, Tina recently graduated as a mature student of fine art, winning the Sculpture Prize for her year. 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
Bio
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 energeticfrequency 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 arious 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 theContemporary Art academy in London continue to expand her thinking.
Artist 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 invadesonce 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 intheir vastness.
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 energeticfrequency 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 arious 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 theContemporary Art academy in London continue to expand her thinking.
Artist 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 invadesonce 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 intheir vastness.
Venue
Venue
The Tabernacle
The Tabernacle
34-35 Powis Square
Notting Hill
London
W11 2AY
T | 020 7221 9700
34-35 Powis Square
Notting Hill
London
W11 2AY
T | 020 7221 9700
1999 The Tabernacle was awarded the RBKC environment award for restoration and conversion, and officially launched by Vanessa and Richard Branson, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and the Duke of Gloucester.
Access
The Tabernacle has level access into the venue’s ground floor restaurant, bar, and accessible toilet.
For more information please contact the venue.
1999 The Tabernacle was awarded the RBKC environment award for restoration and conversion, and officially launched by Vanessa and Richard Branson, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and the Duke of Gloucester.
Access
The Tabernacle has level access into the venue’s ground floor restaurant, bar, and accessible toilet.
For more information please contact the venue.
Artist Statement
MEET THE ARTISTS EVENT
MEET THE ARTISTS EVENT
25th June Wed 6-9pm
25th June Wed 6-9pm
Let us know if you'll be attending! It's FREE.
Let us know if you'll be attending! It's FREE.
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