What does “homeland” mean to you? This was the question we posed to artists in an open call launched in January this year. We invited artists to submit an artwork exploring the theme of Homeland, accompanied by a brief text on what it personally signifies to them. The response was overwhelming—more than 400 powerful submissions poured in, each offering unique and heartfelt perspectives.
After a rigorous selection process judged by Imperial Charity, we are proud to present 33 exceptional finalists. Their works offer poignant, beautiful, and at times bittersweet or humorous interpretations of homeland and belonging. Nearly a year in the making, this exhibition is a true labor of love. The theme of Homeland—perhaps more relevant than ever—speaks to identity, connection, and the emotional ties that bind us to a place or a feeling.
The range of mediums is as diverse as the places our artists call home, and we hope you find meaning in each of these stories. A heartfelt thank you to Imperial Charity for helping bring our vision to life and for your continued dedication to enhancing patient care through art in hospitals.
To explore this online gallery in depth, click on each artists’ name to view their piece alongside the accompanying text.
Camille Lemoine
Louis at home in Rumaucourt
Camille is a photographer based in Scotland. Interested in our evolving relationships to wilder places, her selected photograph is an image of her great uncle’s hand resting on his beloved pony, and is reminiscent of her time spent amongst horses as a child. She interprets the word ‘Homeland’ as more than just a place, but as a feeling of familiarity found in the most fleeting of moments.
Kreative Kwame
The Biker on the Moon
Kwame connects art to important causes. His first exhibition in Cameroon united artists to raise funds and awareness to provide portable water to 700+ children in Debundscha. His winning piece “The Biker on the moon” calls us to dream bigger and more daring – just as his childhood hero Samuel Eto’o did.
Laura Grainger
An Ode to the NHS
Laura is a ceramicist specialising in wheel-thrown stoneware which bridge the gap between healthcare and activism. Her take on 18th-century pharmaceutical bottles, once fixtures in pharmacies imbued with herbs and medicines, sheds light on the evolving landscape of healthcare and celebrates NHS caregivers. Her NHS pots celebrate the place where she feels most at home and highlight the NHS as a huge part of our cultural and national identity.
Nicola Davison Reed
I am Your Harbour
Nicola Davison Reed is a Midlands-based photographer who creates portraits, landscapes and street photography. Nicola’s personal work explores themes of ‘aloneness’, taking into consideration how homeland can be a place in our soul. No matter how disenfranchised we may feel – our homeland is where we feel at peace, whether it’s in a coffee, a conversation, an observation or a place. Homeland is where we can ‘just be’ and it’s to be cherished.
Claire McGinley
Cow Parsley Bank, the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire UK
Claire is a Cambridgeshire-based artist from the Isle of Ely. She painted her winning artwork while sitting outside in her homeland amongst the cow parsley. Exploring what place means to her, she observes the colours and feels the atmosphere of the landscape, reflecting on how this might reveal hidden layers of history. Claire learnt to draw as a very young child with her father, sitting on his drawing board.
Ryan Lugo
Santa Maria
Ryan is a United States-based documentary photographer majoring in Visual Communication Design in South Texas. Ryan’s winning artwork was taken to exhibit and express the political corruption that has been plaguing his rural community. The corruption is affecting not only the education of the local school district but the ability for the water supply company to provide ‘sanitary or drinkable’ water, containing arsenic.
Emma Boittiaux
She’s Here For Them
Emma Boittiaux is a London-based award-winning multidisciplinary artist, whose research intertwines photography, textile, embroidery and writing. Emma’s winning artwork explores the feeling of being between two countries, her homeland and the one she moved to. This is an ode to home in France, her mother and the new home that she is creating here, both evoked through a garden.
Kara Baah
The Load We Carry – Kente cloth
Kara Baah is a Black British artist from London with Ghanaian and Jamaican heritage. She is passionate about mental and physical health, working as both an NHS physiotherapist and artist. She enjoys participating in art markets and exhibitions, encouraging people to explore their well-being. This portrait, part of her “The Load We Carry” series, features a woman wearing kente cloth, historically worn by royalty among the Ashanti and Akan people in Ghana.
Caroline Pick
This Homeland: My Imaginary Extended Family
Lewes-based sculptor, Caroline Pick makes objects of fun and profundity with non-art materials. In her winning photograph she shows how we celebrate momentous events in similar ways across many cultures in spite of our different identities, shapes and colours. What we have in common is the human wish to honour birth, marriage and death communally and publicly. Here, Caroline celebrates the wedding family portrait, while also gently ridiculing the tradition.
Maria Proshkowska
No Name Ritual
Maria is a conceptual, socially engaged artist from Ukraine who is temporarily based in Suffolk due to the war. This award-winning artwork was created for VOGUE Ukraine in collaboration with photographer Serghiy Morgunov to explore the importance of re-examining past experiences.
Performing in the photo, the artist works with soil in her homeland as a fundamental basis of her identity. The hope for future generations to find this archive intact helps to never stop putting scattered pieces together.
Liron Kroll
Between Waters
Liron is an award-winning artist whose work merges photography, photomontage, animation, AR, and AI. She delves into the nature of memory and the complex ways personal and collective narratives are constructed.
Her winning piece, Between Waters, reflects on childhood summers spent at the local pool. Kroll explores the search for a personal “homeland” and the desire to share that connection with her children.
Julieta Tetelbaum
Black Chalk (2022)
Julieta is a neurodivergent queer artist from Buenos Aires, now based in London. As a film director, cinematographer, screenwriter, and sculptor, she explores themes of gender, childhood, intimacy, and functional diversity. Her award-winning film Black Chalk (2022) portrays the intimate story of a woman with Down’s Syndrome who writes her daily tasks on a wall with black chalk to organise her life. The film poignantly reflects on routine, personal connection, and our inner worlds.
Mrudula Kuvalekar
Childhood Frames
Mrudula Kuvalekar (she/they) is an award-winning illustrator based in London. She completed her MA in Illustration from Kingston University in 2021-22. Their work spans publishing, education, and research and combines their love for printmaking, drawing, and collaging. The winning piece is based on a childhood memory of the artist and their brother, evoking feelings of loss and release, when their birthplace is no longer considered their home.
Chelsea Plunket
The Swimmers
Chelsea Plunkett studied graphic design at university but is primarily a self-taught illustrator. She draws inspiration from vintage and mid-century illustrations, embracing both traditional mediums like paint and ink, as well as digital techniques that accommodate her travels. Chelsea finds beauty in everyday life, celebrating the small joys that make each day special.
Growing up in the countryside, her surroundings deeply influence her work, infusing her art with a sense of nostalgia and often exploring how this connection to nature and your surroundings impacts who we are.
Michael Robson May
Clovelly
Michael Robson May is a Dorset-based artist who has been painting and drawing all his life. Michael’s winning artwork captures the beautiful North Devon Coast and the feeling of home existing in the balance of nature’s elemental forces.
Puthimart Naothaworn
A Familiar Glimpse of My Grandpa at Home
Puthimart is a Bangkok-based multimedia illustrator who graduated from Central St Martins in 2022, exploring their Cultural Identity and Chinese ancestry in their works. Puthimart’s winning artwork depicts a distant memory from their homeland, an impression of their late maternal grandfather admiring the skies of Bangkok, surrounded by the flowering plants that he tended amongst the countless ephemera of a warm family home.
Jennifer Camilleri
Where I Be
Jennifer Camilleri is a London-based intuitive painter who transitioned from public art projects to focus on painting and exhibiting. Jennifer’s winning artwork was created from childhood memories of family trips to her homeland. The character and vibrant landscape have been the driving inspiration to her works to date.
Arianna Sciarrone
Magic “Spaghetti Al Pomodoro” Recipe
Arianna Sciarrone is an Italian artist, currently based between Italy and the Netherlands. Her artistic practice goes from illustration and painting to relational art projects. In her winning work, Arianna evokes the warmth of childhood memories through the sensory experience of food, inviting viewers to reconnect with their cultural roots and the unique essence of their homeland, transcending the boundaries of time and distance.
Samuel Sharp
Portrait of Alicia
Samuel Sharp is a Yorkshire-based artist whose work is inspired by personal experiences. His winning piece, a portrait of his wife Alicia, captures their emotional journey through three years of IVF. Alicia, his rock, provides him with strength and stability. The portrait symbolises their love, resilience, and the belief that, despite life’s challenges, they will always find home in each other as they begin the next chapter of their lives.
Sara Zinelli
Reminiscing
Sara Zinelli is an Italian collage artist. She moved to England a long time ago and currently lives in the countryside. Sara rediscovered collage during the pandemic and it quickly became an obsession. Her collages often delve into childhood memories using photographic materials from her family archive. The selected artwork features the artist as a young child and the village where she grew up.
Tanisha Bhatt
Wild
Tanisha Bhatt is an artist based in India who draws inspiration from everything that brings her joy. Tanisha’s winning artwork reimagines all the humans who have been her safe space as animals and puts them in one place that has always felt like home – the wild.
Winnie Wan
Special Places
Winnie is based in London and loves painting with watercolours. She hopes to share her emotions and stories with others through her beautiful paintings. Her winning artwork was inspired by her life experiences in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and now the UK.
Xingyi Qu
By The Sea
Xingyi Qu is a London-based artist who works with multiple materials to explore colour and spatial composition in visual art. Xingyi’s winning artwork illustrates home, nostalgia and spirituality from the perspective of a traveller. By painting the landscapes she came across while travelling, she builds up dialogues about the idea of ‘homeland’ with the locals and the audience. Is it just a picture of someone’s homeland, or is it also spiritual homeland for the artist and many other audiences?
Yevhen Samuchenko
Red Runway
Yevhen is an award-winning Ukrainian photographer whose work has been published and exhibited internationally, including 12 Museums exhibitions across the globe.
“My homeland is Ukraine and I am now here in Odesa, Ukraine, with my family during this war. Despite all the difficulties and dangers of life, blackouts, missile and drone attacks, my family and I have decided to stay here.
This picture was taken before the war. Poppy fields, green wheat and a beautiful sunset. This is how my homeland was before the war, and this is how it remains in my heart.”
Zorica Purlija
Montenegro Setting Sun
Born in Montenegro, Zorica is a contemporary visual artist based on Gadigal land, Australia. Working predominantly in photography, Purlija’s work is based on attachment and care for the primary relationships and landscape she finds herself in. Her winning piece “Montenegro setting sun” reflects the psychological turmoil of her mother’s new Homeland in Australia, surrounded by treasured objects from her original Homeland, Montenegro, which she left over fifty years ago.
Ayanava Sil
This Homeland
Ayanava Sil is a self-taught street and documentary photographer from India. During weekdays, he works for a leading global e-commerce and tech corporation, while his weekends are devoted to photography. Ayanava’s winning photo from the COVID-19 era portrays the corner of his home as a homeland, filled with warmth and colour. It reminds us of the comfort, love and resilience in familiar spaces, offering hope during uncertain times.
Andrea Humphries
Coffee and Flowers
Andrea Humphries is a London-based painter whose subjects include animals, birds, landscapes and flowers. A recurring theme in her still life work is the vessel motif set against a window or on a table. The painting ‘Coffee and Flowers’ shows her contentment for the ordinary. Humphries creates a feeling of nostalgia by peppering bold colour with washes of grey and pink, and uses favourite domestic objects that to her, best reflect family and community.
Cat Askew
Terraced Trinkets
Cat Askew is an interdisciplinary artist from Portsmouth. Her practice is predominantly text based and humorous, evolving from banners and t-shirts to painted objects and poetry. Cat’s work shows an array of objects from her home, the accompanying poem explaining the sanctuary of moving back to her parent’s house. Where else would you find a guinea pig egg cup and an Edinburgh crystal shot glass?
Lorna Brown
This Homeland
Following 20 years in unrelated employment, Lorna went on to study a degree in Fine Art, graduating in 2000. Her ’This Homeland’ collage was inspired by a visit to a house in St Ives that has been the seat of continual creation for painters, writers, poets, and publishers for multiple generations; through the owners’ family who has been integral to that process.
Fionnuala Gibson
Front Door
Native Londoner Fionnuala Gibson is a former trained nurse. Although not professionally trained in art, she has been developing her creative skills over the last few years. Working with acrylic paints, Fionnuala’s portfolio has a strong emphasis on light and vibrant colours. Her winning artwork ‘Front door’ is painted from the perspective from within her home, looking at the world outside. It symbolises the comfort and solace that a home provides.
Scherry Shi
Dad’s Noodle Soup
Scherry Shi is a London-based artist whose practice explores the relationship between places and their inhabitants, migration, personal memories and transitional identities. Scherry’s winning artwork is created to evoke the nostalgic, far away homeland from memories, after one has left their hometown and settled in a new place. Her work explores the relationship between home, cultural displacement, food and memory.
Rebecca Moss Guyver
A ‘World-Land’
Rebecca Moss Guyver is an American Suffolk-based painter. She works in egg tempera and tells stories with objects collected from charity shops and car boot sales. In Rebecca’s winning artwork, she has assembled a tableau of objects that are symbols through which viewers can imagine the joyful feeling of being connected to the wider world where Homeland isn’t so much a place as a connection to places and people met throughout life.
Phyllis Dunseth
Siblings
Phyllis Dunseth is an artist specialising in stained glass design, fine art, and art history. With a Master’s in Fine Art and a Postgraduate Certificate in Architecture and Glass from Central St. Martins, she blends traditional craftsmanship with modern technologies. Her award-winning artwork evokes a deep nostalgia for Wales, where she spent her childhood visiting her grandparents, infusing her pieces with personal memory and cultural resonance.
We hope you’ve enjoyed viewing the artists and their incredible works selected for our exhibition. The show will be on display for the next year across three prime London hospital spaces within The Imperial College NHS Trust. You can currently view it at Charing Cross Hospital until December 2024, after which it will move on to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington for the beginning of 2025, concluding at Hammersmith Hospital in Summer 2025.