STATEMENT

I work primarily in painting, drawing, and object-making—disciplines through which I investigate the fragile relationship between self and surroundings. My practice is driven by a persistent question: How do we inhabit a world that increasingly feels alien, fragmented, or out of sync with our inner reality?

For me, the torn or layered image functions as a metaphor for memory caught between retention and erasure—between what we long to preserve and what we must discard to survive psychologically. This tension stems from lived experience: after nearly a decade in England, my return to Russia did not bring reintegration but displacement of another kind. Caught between systems of thought, education, and cultural logic, I found myself in what I call an “intertextual purgatory”—a no-place where identity stalls, neither here nor there.

My paintings and drawings give form to this suspended state. Objects I create—often assembled from discarded materials or domestic remnants—extend this condition into physical space, acting as silent witnesses to systemic “errors” in how environments are constructed, inherited, or imposed. Craft remains essential: the hand’s labor becomes a counterweight to abstraction, grounding existential unease in pigment, paper, wood, and thread.

Ultimately, my work resists resolution. It does not seek to restore wholeness but to dwell honestly in the gap—between memory and forgetting, belonging and estrangement, the desired world and the one we actually inhabit. In doing so, it asks whether art can offer not answers, but a space to breathe within the error.