Featured Artists #10: Peter Carrington / Marc Allgaier / Victoria Plotnikova
MEANS explores the work of two exciting visual artists
A special December bumper edition of our Artists Feature series. We’ve put together the works of 3 exciting artists, just in time for Christmas.
Check them out below!
Peter Carrington
Peter Carrington (b.2002) is a multidisciplinary artist from Northern Ireland. Currently studying a Master of Fine Art at Ulster University, he works primarily in expanded printmaking, sculpture and installation. His practice explores childhood memory and the symbolic power of toys, focusing on their potential to force gender roles, promote violence and social conditioning. Using his own childhood toys as source material, Carrington reimagines them through tactile, interactive prints, some that change colour with touch, others that smell – inviting playful engagement whilst prompting critical reflection. Carington then asks: What ideologies can we inherit through play, and how might we reframe them? Through ‘Dancing Ladies’ and ‘Little Soldiers’, both scratch and sniff prints, his work embodies magic through material transformation. By reworking objects and materials, once burdened with rigid meaning, Carrington finds hope in creative reinterpretation, offering subtle and tactile resistance that transforms the familiar into surprise. Carrington’s most recent exhibitions include: Enfolded Journeys ( Touring England, Scotland and Venice) 2025/26, Pulse and Emergence VIII (QSS, Belfast) 2025, and IMPACT 12 (UWE Bristol) 2022. Carrington was also the 2024 recipient of the Bill Penny Memorial Award, and has work held in public and private collections.
Marc Allgaier
Marc Allgaier is a visual artist based in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied Communication Design at the University of Design in Schwäbisch Gmünd and works at the intersection of spatial collage, visual systems, and material-based installation. His practice focuses on layering: cardboard, photographic fragments, and architectural elements form fragile, walkable structures. These works explore how history, perception, and systems of order inscribe themselves into surfaces and spaces — and how these systems can be opened, shifted, or interrupted. Rather than providing fixed meanings, his installations operate as open fields of transition and association. Allgaier’s immersive work Berg- und Talfahrt was recently selected for the exhibition Matrix-Ost in Berlin. His work has also been featured in international publications, including Art Horizons Magazine (2025). He regularly participates in group exhibitions, residencies, and open calls throughout the German-speaking region and beyond. His artistic approach combines formal clarity with conceptual openness. Through image construction and spatial rhythm, Allgaier invites viewers into uncertain environments — not to find answers, but to experience the possibility of new perspectives emerging through fragmentation.
The immersive collage Berg- und Talfahrt creates a landscape in motion — fragile, fragmented, and constantly shifting. Built from layered cardboard, photographs, and found materials, it forms a walkable terrain where perception becomes unsettled and boundaries dissolve. What appears ruinous at first glance becomes a space of quiet transformation. Nothing is stable, but everything is in process. Hope, in this context, is not a promise — it’s an act of reassembly. Magic, likewise, is not illusion but material intuition: the ability to generate presence from brokenness, to let meaning arise from distortion. The work does not illustrate hope. Instead, it enacts it — as a visual method of constructing the possible from what remains. It resists closure. Its rhythm is irregular, its surface incomplete. But precisely in its instability, it opens a space for projection, movement, and change. In this way, Berg- und Talfahrt explores the poetic force of uncertainty — not as loss, but as potential.
Victoria Plotnikova
Victoria Plotnikova is a Ukrainian artist, illustrator, and designer whose work weaves personal experience with broader societal narratives. Through a range of mediums—drawing, printmaking, and design—she explores the complexities of self-identity and collective memory. Her series such as Oblivion, Child’s Dream, and Ways of Alarm reflect a poetic yet powerful visual language shaped by resilience, reflection, and transformation. Victoria’s artistic journey is rooted in Kharkiv, where she studied fine arts and printmaking, later continuing her practice in Switzerland. Her experiences during the war profoundly influence her creative voice, as she addresses themes of displacement, anxiety, and the endurance of the human spirit. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in collections from Japan to the USA. Whether through delicate illustrations or bold social commentary, Victoria’s art channels emotion into imagery, offering quiet yet insistent calls for empathy, dignity, and renewal.
“Flower of hope” — on a path filled with trials, it is the faith in better days that becomes the root from which the meaning of life grows.
“Your eagle will soar” — When dark clouds gather, and worry crows hover, an eagle lives within the heart — strong and resolute — ready to rise above all shadows. This symbol of hope and strength is rendered through bold, textured layers that embody the soaring spirit.