I am a visual artist, a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art currently working in Vienna and Prague. In my practice I focus mainly on mixed-media installation and photography that use re-assembled found materials to explore the quality of the space as a habitat and a a concept of ‘home’.
Found objects appeal to me by their deep-rooted familiarity, their sense of age created by gradual erosion though use and their re-shaping through possession. Essential to my work is the ability of such objects to create an emotionally coloured space, which is then narrated by the artist through deliberate suggestions and visual clues. My installations glamourise domesticalities, offer an insight into a fictional habitat, explore the routines, the eccentricities and homemade erotica. The substance of those artificial living spaces is the inherent contradiction between their qualities of a theatre stage and an abandoned habitat, deliberate exposure and trespass into the intimate landscape.
My interest in habitats partly relates to my upbringing in the post-USSR nomadic lifestyle of my family; I am attracted to the adaptable qualities of the objects in living spaces and the skills of temporary home-making.
Overtime, the unfamiliar space becomes a personal comfort zone - my work sythesises those living spaces, maping the history of the individual through the traces left on their inanimate surroundings. The resulting multi-layered, tactile pieces use the past functions and sentiments of the original materials and invite the viewers to become poetic Frankensteins of the fictional past.