MEANS once again shares the work of two exciting grassroots artists. This post marks the eighth of our new online series, where we showcase two artists whose work we particularly admire. Check them out below!
O Yemi has exhibited worldwide and received awards and recognitions. His works were awarded 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th and 6th places in political commentaries in American Art Awards from 2014 to 2022. He also received the First Round Award with cash in the Art Olympia 2015 International Open exhibition in Tokyo, Japan. He was awarded 2nd Place Prize in the 2025 “Save Our Planet” Exhibition by Red Bluff Gallery, Corning, California, USA. He was awarded the “Cultural Best Practice Award” with “Message In A Bottle in the 2024 International FL3TCH3R EXHIBITION in Johnson City, Tennessee, USA. UK No Name Collective Art Magazine awarded him the Finalist Certificate for the 2024 Annual Challenge. He was selected as one of the 50 artists winners of the Premier Artist Prize 2024. He was a winner of the Award of Distinction in the Southern Tier Artists 2024 Noteworthy: Music in Art Exhibition. He won the Fletcher H Dyer Award at the 11th Anniversary FL3TCH3R 2023 Exhibition. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2023 Brouhahaart ‘Climate Change’ “Right Here, Right Now” exhibition.” He won the First-Place award with his painting “The Chickens’ Fight” in the WAR or PEACE 2022 Competition by Art Impact International.
The theme of my works, in general, is “The Facts of Life: Roses and Thorns.” Life is roses and thorns; sometimes it emanates the sweet aroma of pleasantness, and sometimes it pricks and causes pain. I often use roses and thorns for portrait paintings of the facts of people’s lives. I have adopted this floral iconography style - Roses and Thorns as my unique style in some of my paintings like “DOMESTIC ABUSE” and “MY MOTHER, Her Majesty Platinum Jubilee: Her Rosy Reign”, to name a few. Roses are for achievements and other positive parts of life, and Thorns are for painful challenges and negative parts of life.
Find out more about O Yemi’s work: https://o-yemi-tubi.pixels.com
Danielle Oliver is a multidisciplinary artist working with typography, collage, photography, and digital manipulation. Her practice centres on authorship, control, and the politics of being heard. She uses her self-developed Hardcut Form method, a layered approach that combines original photography, physical collage, four-channel manual blending, and typographic intervention. Typography is not an afterthought in her work. It is the structural foundation. Danielle’s work often responds to systems that shape voice, identity, and visibility. Her recent project, The Unmute Project, explored what happens when people are invited to speak on their own terms, without correction or simplification. Her pieces For Display Only and Loud Minds, Fragile Voices were created in response to real conversations shared during the project. Both works challenge how language, silence, and control are handled in public and personal space. Originally trained in graphic design, Danielle transitioned into fine art to expand her methods and challenge conventional boundaries of visual communication. She is based in Hull and recently completed her BA (Hons) Fine Art degree, where she submitted The Unmute Project as her self-initiated final major project.
The Unmute Project was created as part of my final major project and continues to develop as a wider body of work exploring typographic authorship, expression, and control. The project included a series of workshops where participants were introduced to the idea of typography as voice. They used variable fonts to create short statements that reflected something they wanted to say but often couldn’t. These statements were not edited or corrected. The original language and typographic tone were preserved throughout. Alongside videos of their voices and typographic choices, I created four individual responses based on the themes and tensions I picked up on during the workshops. These pieces were produced using my Hardcut Form method, which combines photography, physical collage, digital manipulation, and typography. More information and documentation can be found at:
www.danielleoliver.art/portfolio-home-page/the-unmute-project/
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