An artist whose work inspires people to dream and to act. An interview with Victoria Ark

Hi everyone! Welcome to issue 4 of our #ourstudents series — interviews in which our students talk about themselves and their art.

This issue’s guest is the artist Victoria Ark.

Born in Moscow in 1964, she graduated from the Applied Arts faculty of the Kosygin Russian State University (formerly the Textile Academy). Victoria spent more than 20 years working in textile and interior design. In 2020 she turned to contemporary art and enrolled that same year in the one-year program at the School of Abstract Art of the Russian Union of Abstractionists.

What inspires you to make work?

Hidden beauty — the unnoticed, undeveloped facets of the things around us that are hard to catch at the speed we live. Untouched depths of meaning; barely familiar concepts and ideas that invite you to look into them and take you beyond the usual, systematic way of seeing.

What themes do you raise in your art?

Making sense of what the world is worth, through self-reflection in symbolic compositions built on the inner and outer forms I’m exploring:

• • the metamorphosis of everyday objects into an abstract vision, freeing your perception of the world by changing your experience of reality.
  • human identity as a whole — the many layers of the human make-up and the forms identity takes, and the study of emotional states, ego states and subpersonalities.

What do you consider your main achievement so far?

Finding my own steady, personal method — one that gives me a space to frame my thoughts and to express myself at depth. I’d count something else as an achievement too, thanks in part to Maria’s program “Selling and Promoting Art for Artists in Russia and Abroad” — and to a lot of work on my own part: very clearly defined, unshakeable, high-level goals, plus a strategy and a concrete plan for developing and promoting myself within institutions.

What is your mission as an artist?

To inspire people to act… each in their own way. To think about something important, to look into something new, to learn something or change something, to stop and glance around — or maybe to start imagining, to dream of something big and take the first steps towards something that matters to them.

Can you give three pieces of advice to artists who want to make contemporary art?

1. Look for meaning, sift through ideas, notice what genuinely resonates — what grabs you personally, inspires you and makes you want to make something.

2. Train your eye. Don’t be afraid and don’t be too lazy to study the whole range of methods and tools. Experiment, keep learning again and again, don’t stop. Take your work to your own standard of perfection.

3. Believe in yourself and in your path — a long road tests the strength of that belief. Remember the future you keep returning to, what your target scenario looks like, the one you’re certain of, so you can play it through again and again until it becomes the present moment.