Fear is one of a few universal emotions, experienced by everyone, arising with a threat of harm, physical or emotional, real or imagined.
This series is focusing on our subconscious perception of fear, evaluated in a form of free text written on paper with the future visualization.
As a part of my therapy it was one of the first small exercises: attempts to define inner fears, to find the right treatment and understand its nature.
This practice was evaluated in the form of free text/poems/notes and almost any text format I felt like using, both in my native language - Russian and English.
After a while almost 8 pages were written, saturated with details of each fear, situations where it first appeared, some thoughts or descriptions.
Meticulously selecting some specific phrases that resonated the most, I started creating visual compositions in my head.
Difficult process of revealing truth you were always avoiding to know or rediscovering memories you have forgotten for years.
Looking closely at the topics of family, parents, sense of home, war, inner silence, fear of being left.
In pair with using mix-media techniques (3D, 2D, printing, collage, oil painting) I tried to create an immersive experience for the viewer, almost as if you were in the scene yourself.
Combination of two colour palettes for each piece, as an expression of circumstances and feelings I have now.
After months of tedious work both on myself and this series, months of self exploration, ups and downs, having a clearer vision of myself and my mental health I’m beyond excited to present my new series - memoirs.
73rd kilometre
Light and sound from this celestial land;
only the wind tickling my eyes
And flood the gulf in impious hand.
She's a magic flash over the sky.
3D, Oil paint, mixmedia, collage,ink drawing
Sense of home. Such a fundamental part of our life we rarely think of, how touching that is, this stronghold is so fragile.
Fear tracing back to 3 years ago and my compelled immigration for studies to Spain, leaving my homeland, friends and lifestyle in the past, settling a quite prosaic idea in my mind - when I come back my home will never be the same.
Intensifying & taking on a new dimension with the beginning of war, loosing relatives and friends, slowly realizing that your fundament is overgrown with cracks, your home doesn’t exist anymore and might never exist in a way you remember it.
Yet discovering that rough truth and acknowledging it, evoked long forgotten memories, of the most scarce place, home in its essence, mixed with ever forgiving period of childhood, period of ocean knee tall, period where your imagination is part of the real world - my country house.
All the warm memories accompanied with radiant summer days, my grandmother cooking blini early in the morning and me escaping the house with sister to build shelters in the forest.
That forest was the first image to appear in my head after thinking of home and its sense for me, I couldn’t resist not to include photo of my sister running towards me on our last visit there years ago…only the wind is tickling my eyes.
9 lives
souls scorched to the ground remained until dawn
Set forth a white voice in a thrilled cry,
That the story of the night is drawn,
will it matter when you die
3D, Oil paint, mixmedia, collage,ink drawing
A rather existential question of life and death, yet death being so present lately in our lives in a form of war.
While we can accept and live with the suddenness of being and inevitability of our death;
Death of our closest ones is always sudden, even long expected, the moment, the second frightens with its abruptness.
I remember grandmother, being a child of war, telling younger me spooky stories about war and old times, while I could’ve never imagined it will touch me in any way.
It is taking such a fundamental right from us - it endangers your very right to exist, it jeopardizes the basic right to thinking about the meaning of existence, the fear of war, compelling you to look at the issue of total survival.
I’m lucky enough not to be in the first echelon at the front, nor to be involved in it directly, yet seeing that pain from friends and unknown people on the street, that are almost bursting in tears from the first thought of it.
Days, weeks, months, it has become commonplace, as yesterday's day of reckoning has become commonplace.
Dispelling cold and darkness in the souls of people. Burning destinies with precious napalm, leaving only scorched fields.
Why foreplay, just kill me.
mine your our silhouette
3D, Oil paint, mixmedia, collage,ink drawing
Stinging sense of loneliness, yet the one that you’ve never experienced before. Being estranged not only from loved ones, but from yourself.
Almost as if you tripping on your last minutes of running marathon, strained plastic confidence, shattering into million pieces so fleetingly.
Questioning every step you make, leaving you in the fog of unknownness.
Yet image of that fog of unknownness and associations with misty forest surfaced in the back of my mind for quite a while, every time I had a thought about loneliness/ being estranged.
For the first time it appeared as a mix of Natalia Goncharova early works depicting nature, mixed with my love to cinema: both Nostalgia 1983, Antichrist 2009, Stalker 1979…
Creating a surreal place where someone once was in, or maybe still is, yet we can see only small hints, clues of presence, silhouette of once thriving life, capturing Qualia, a personalized subjective instance in a form where every viewer would feel it.
Sense of staying there forever.
without you
without tears
without muse
staying here in perpetuity
rai
3D, Oil paint, mixmedia, collage,ink drawing
Turning to God, what do you ask him?
Where does all this injustice come from in the world, what is the meaning of life, what is the only religion, is there heaven & hell, why does it rain ?
You know the feeling as if you turned the wrong way and the path became intricate.
You walk in circles, choosing words, realizing everything can be fixed only by returning back.
Looking at the world from under the screen of broken prejudices and loss of meaning, a rather curious picture of what is happening opens up, you begin to question things that didn’t bother you before, or on the contrary stop being worried by some aspects of life that were a necessity before.
Once was said - only by losing everything we are able to gain something more,
In chase of quick success I started loosing my inner voice…inner freedom, point…point of what I’m doing and why am I doing it.
Quite a spicy mix of a long lasting depression with spoiled ideals and goals, whipping one another.
Way too cinematic and hyperbolic to say - I lost everything, yet naturally it happened so, I started loosing close friends, family, myself.
It was a right decision to spent several months in summer, traveling around the globe in search for new meanings and understanding myself better.
One of the niches that helped me in search for myself was new philosophical treatises in combination with studying religion as a source of world-knowledge.
Stoicism and its studies were one of the instances, realizing the fundamental thought of a person not being concerned with the things themselves, but with his own opinion/perception about these things, following up with a more balanced attitude towards life and emotions, trying to care less about things that aren’t important, looking at them subjectively.
Not that I became a stoic, rather I was in search, diving deep into Phenomenology, hermeneutics, big chunk of existentialism, Buddhism, christianity, etc. Coming with hard, yet much needed decision to seek for therapy and more professional help, resulting in a more balanced outlook on life.
This work is a landmark of my search, dropping old values, restructuring life, learning more about myself, greedily reveling with philosophy and long lasting early morning talks about our existence.
Looking for your Paradise.
mama
3D, Oil paint, mixmedia, collage,ink drawing
Fear that terrifyingly became a reality, not being able to see my parents and my mother in particular. Almost like held in prisoned in our homeland, getting increasingly more and more difficult to escape and meet, seeing how my mother is loosing hope and sparkle in her eyes every time we have a call.
Murmuring goodbye with tears rolling down my face, realizing it might be the last time we see each other. Manifesting that it will be fine and we will find the way, slowly witnessing how life is being sucked from mothers soul. Even though I know you are here, you are close. You are not here, you are there.
noon radiant
3D, Oil paint, mixmedia, collage,ink drawing
At least once in our life, if we are lucky enough we get to experience a brief sensation of being present in our life, sensation of transience of being, a momentum we realize life isn’t granted and we are living it once, this hour, minute, second will never be the same again. Since the beginning of the war I was insatiably reflecting on those few moments in my life, moments of pure happiness with a group of my closest friends.
Even though now we are all scattered around the world and some are lost in the abyss of life, I will always remember that time, that radiant noon, gathering together, reading Faust and dreaming of how we will change the world with our poetry of life, reveling in wine sweetness of our dreams and ambitions.
Time before kids were taken from their mothers for slaughter, times before it was impossible to find anything certain in the world of uncertainty, building the ‘new world’ on bones.
An ode to all, who lived in that moment, sharing the noon in radiant, and once again I will remember gratefully.