A budding Italian artist currently living in London’s East End who paints for a hobby has achieved international recognition with one of her works now on show in downtown New York.

Giulia Marras, 30, an English language student at Tower Hamlets College, has work from her latest collection titled Philosophy of Lines being displayed at the Trygve Lie Gallery in Manhattan.

Giulia, originally from Sardinia who studied ceramic art at an art school in Italy, enjoys painting in her spare time. But her ambition is one day to open her own art gallery and ceramic studio.

“I felt like a fish out of water when I first arrived in London,” she recalls.

“I couldn’t speak English, which made things harder. But these feelings gave me an idea about a new range of paintings I could work on.”

Her artwork made its way to New York after she was contacted by Merlino Bottega d’Arte, a gallery in Florence which had seen her work on her Facebook page.

Giulia, currently living in Limehouse, really would love her work to go on show in a London gallery.

“But the cost to exhibit is very expensive here,” she tells you. “Ideally I would love to have my own gallery one day with a ceramics laboratory.”

For the moment, she has had her work displayed at the college Arbour Square campus in Stepney.

Giulia decided to release a range of paintings aptly titled Fish Out of Water to reflect her mood, while studying on her English course at Tower Hamlets college and juggling with her job at Harrod’s tearoom in Knightsbridge.