The contradictory inner world of a woman exploring her own states

What is your art about?

My art is the fantastical, searching, contradictory inner world of a woman. A woman who explores her own states and lives through them in her body. At a certain point in my life I needed to shake off tons of suggestions, rules and other people’s expectations of me. I created this fantastical world as a safe space where anything is possible.

The central figure is a woman. She is very sensitive and receptive, and she asks a great many questions about her inner cosmos, the outside world, relationships between people and the spiritual side of life. The symbols in the paintings answer those questions. Animals and objects appear beside the woman’s figure like clues surfacing from the unconscious. My paintings are a road along which a woman gets to know herself.

What is the process behind the work?

The main thing in making a painting is living the feelings through the body. I film my intuitive movements and then draw from freeze-frames. Then, going by the inner sensation of that non-verbal message, I choose the symbols and images I need. I finish the painting with patterns made in the flow of emotion and of the sensations from travelling into its fantastical scene.

I love mixing techniques and materials. I paint in acrylic on wood, but I add graphic elements — graphite pencil, raised outliner. The fluid, watercolour-like technique is balanced by painstakingly drawn patterns. For me that’s a symbol of balance and completeness.

How did you come to understand that contemporary art was the direction for you?

I discovered the world of contemporary art not that long ago, and I was delighted to find in it the freedom I’d been looking for both in art and in life. I also love the fact that contemporary artists reflect their own time and preserve it for history.

I always look at the world globally — I go from the micro to the macro cosmos, from the individual to humanity. And I want to reflect all of that in my parallel world.

What matters to you in art?

What themes do you enjoy raising in your art?

My work deals with the questions a contemporary, spiritual, thoughtful person is searching through right now. It’s about the search for what has been rejected. Rejection of your lineage, the problem of the link between generations, being separated by distance. Rejection of gender, the blurring of genders and the failure to feel your own nature.

The study of the individual — an essence sealed inside a shell. About being closed in. About feeling either forever alone or reliably protected inside that shell. I explore the border between two worlds, the inner one and the outer one.

Binarity, which shows up both in the subjects and in the materials. Opposites are what drives this world. Inner and outer, digital and living, mother and father, breathing out and breathing in, life and death.

Would you like to tell us about one work in more detail?

Treating our past as something solid to lean on is a mistake. The past doesn’t exist. It’s like milk: dive into it and you see nothing, and your imagination fills in the outlines. But that’s already fantasy, so you may as well not dive in and not try to open your eyes in that substance. By tying ourselves to a goal, we can imagine our past, believe in it and live in the present as if in an alternative universe, leaving the traumatic past out. And that very gap in the fabric of things shows us the strength of the inner world and what we’re capable of beyond the ordinary.

What have been the most important things to happen to you in art at this stage?

I started Maria’s course in September 2023. Almost a year has passed since then. In that time I’ve picked up a lot of tools for promoting my work, and that gives me a clear, understandable path. I also started making sense of the art I create, and that mattered to me enormously! I began studying contemporary art as a whole and worked out how to do it systematically — how to place my own art next to what is being made right now. That was a huge source of inspiration. My art has visibly changed; it’s become more gallery-ready. I’ve started thinking in projects and seeing the venues that matter.

Has studying on our program been useful to you?