When Two Artists Built a Creative Community Across the Atlantic
Written by Paola Minekov
Published on September 24th, 2026
It feels fitting, if a little strange, that I’m interviewing them from London while they finally sit together in New York. For the last year, a screen was what linked these two artists, and the wider art collective they drew together across London and New York. Now, it’s what separates me from a conversation happening, for once, in the very same room.
It all started with a chance meeting in the aftermath of COVID.
It all started with a chance meeting in the aftermath of COVID. Michelle Baharier met New York artist Vermillion in 2023, when they were both exhibiting in Mushrooms at SHARP Gallery in London. The show grew out of Vermillion’s concept, which she had first curated in New York before it travelled across the Atlantic. It was a strange time, with people still grappling with a somewhat surreal return to normalcy after the pandemic. “Society had changed,” Michelle says. “People seemed less aware of others.” Michelle offered to show Vermillion the local art scene. She took her to art openings, attended a London Colour Walk with her and chatted over coffee. Neither artist could have known then what would follow.
That first meeting became a continuing conversation. The conversation then developed into a series of Saturday art sessions, bringing more than twenty artists from both cities together on Zoom, across a five-hour time difference.
Last week, Baharier travelled to New York for Unfurling: Coming Out of Isolation, the exhibition that has grown out of that collaboration, presented simultaneously at Bethlem Gallery in London and Fountain House Gallery in New York. The physical meeting feels like the final piece of a project that was created entirely through distance.
For Vermillion, one of the most poignant moments came when the exhibition had opened and Michelle finally appeared at the gallery door.
“It was magical when Michelle showed up,” she says, remembering how Michelle looked closely at the artwork in the gallery. “Michelle really looks.” For Vermillion, that distinction matters. At an exhibition, people can be there simply to be seen, more focused on themselves and the event than on the art. Michelle, on the other hand, genuinely engaged with the artwork. “When I look at a piece through her eyes, I can see the things she says about it. It’s touching, and very deep.”
Both Baharier and Vermillion are interdisciplinary artists whose work refuses to fit comfortably within a single category. They share an instinct to experiment, to collaborate, and to use art as a way of making sense of lived experience, yet they are also markedly different in their practices, their backgrounds, and even in how they understand isolation, the theme at the heart of their project and exhibition.
Both Baharier and Vermillion are interdisciplinary artists whose work refuses to fit comfortably within a single category.
Vermillion’s art moves through performance, visual art, mosaic, installation, discarded objects, fashion and, more recently, line drawing, which she describes as more meditative, “just me and the page.” She calls her overall practice eclectic.
Baharier’s practice is similarly difficult to contain, encompassing painting, performance, drawing and storytelling, and her lived experience of disability and mental health. During the collaboration she made over a hundred drawings and has since developed a new series around bedrooms and beds. The sessions, she says, became “quite addictive, it was powerful to see that you weren’t alone.”
For Vermillion, the value of the group was less about output than about what happens when different minds share a space at all. “It multiplies the power and the resources in the room,” she says. Ideas bounce between people; solutions and perspectives appear that wouldn’t otherwise. It can “grow like mushrooms.”
There is a strange intimacy in working apart.
There is a strange intimacy in working apart. Neither artist describes the collaboration simply as a story of isolation followed by a return to connection.
“We were working together, but we weren’t physically together,” Michelle explains. That separation, she says, gave the group “a wider scope and wider opportunities”: they didn’t have to be in the same country, or even the same city, to build something real together. The screen, which during the pandemic had so often represented distance and loss, became instead a way of creating an entirely new kind of proximity.
That complicated, for Michelle, the very idea of “coming out of isolation.” At one point in the process, the group’s studio director Karen Gormandy suggested a different word: integrate. It stopped her short. “Do I really want to integrate back into society?” she wondered. Perhaps not, when society had changed so much since COVID, and not for the better. “We didn’t all want to rush out the door and be integrated,” she says. “I think that’s really important.”
Vermillion came at it from the opposite direction. For her, travel had always been the antidote; she had a hunch, going in, that connecting artists across cities would be good for people. It was. What she hadn’t expected was how differently others carried isolation. Over the year she saw how deeply it can settle into someone: how you take small steps out, then falter at the larger decisive one, an irrational fear almost undoing the effort just as it matters most. “You get so used to it that you don’t even realize what you’re missing,” she says. The danger wasn’t only in staying isolated but in coming out of it alone: reach for the exit without asking for help, she noticed, and you can crash harder than before. What made the difference was the collective. With supportive artists on both sides of the Atlantic, people could be carried through the moment they might otherwise have retreated from. “We were lucky,” she says. “We could offer support to each other.”
Some isolation is necessary, she remarks almost as an afterthought. She has known moments of deliberately withdrawing to regenerate. We all have. This remark feels like the real texture of the exhibition’s theme: not isolation defeated but isolation understood, its costs, its uses, and the difference a group can make in telling them apart.
What happens when people simply keep showing up? Vermillion thought the challenge would be physical, how to work over Zoom, how to manage the different materials and equipment. What she hadn’t anticipated was the human growth she observed. She found herself in daily contact with a small, consistent group of people, Michelle among them, describing the exchange between them as “mesmerizing, and precious.” The experience also revealed something about her own strengths: a gift, she realized, for bringing people together, for proposing an idea, then stepping back and letting other people bring their own energy to it, rather than micromanage the outcome. She calls it growing into “artistic maturity.”
What happens when people simply keep showing up?
But she’s equally clear that collaboration asks something of you in return. “You really need to choose your people,” she says. “You need to protect what you do, because it’s vulnerable.”
One of the clearest expressions of the relationship between the two artists is Baharier’s painting Tiny Creatures, which Vermillion chose to represent the show and it provided unity by being the face of the show, book, and postcard invite.
Vermillion saw something in the piece that spoke directly to the project. The figures, though small on the canvas, felt outsized to her: a group of eccentric characters who’d somehow found each other, funny, imperfect, oddly bonded. They reminded her, she says, of people who might regularly meet at a bar, hash things out, and get each other through whatever needed getting through. They didn’t look alike. But they’d simply shown up, together. That, for Vermillion, became a kind of metaphor for the group itself: a community built less on shared background than on the simple, repeated act of showing up for each other, week after week, and making art.
Paola Minekov is an artist and Creative Director and Arts Editor of Elysium Lifestyle Magazine, an online lifestyle publication written by women for women. Born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, she left at eighteen and has since lived and worked in Israel, the Netherlands, California, and, since 2008, the UK. She holds a BA in Communication and Multimedia Design from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She is also cofounder of Creations Atelier, a London-based platform connecting artists and creatives with property and design professionals. Paola writes about art, travel, and culture, drawing on two decades of moving between countries and a particular interest in ritual, folk traditions, and the character of places. Her paintings have appeared on the covers of books by Joel Vos and Claudia Moscovici,
Website: paola.art
Instagram: @paolaminekov