How did you get into your subject matter? I have a biographic reason to pursue the subject of plants. Common weed Dockweed was close to magical remedy that brought me to life as I got infected at birth ward with Staphylococcus (B), after antibiotics failed, near miraculous recovery attributed by some to my midsummer night’s birth. My mother studied botany at university, but her grandmother was the known village ved’ma (“ved-to know” in slavic) ritual incantations and plant remedies as first aid. I feel like I am fulfilling this matrilineal genetic program of re-enchantment with nature. In the early years in my life was synched with that of the plants – following the planting and harvesting seasons as my family farmed out of habit or necessity and tended for the forest – their life’s work. We lived in a forest until I was 5, my closest friend was a sheep and I was caught talking with trees. In the last 5 years interest in plants grew into plant Renaissance, producing exciting dialogue among environmentalists and philosophers. It also coincided with the personal crisis as I burned out emotionally while following the news of East Ukraine and Crimea and painting for a year media images covering the invasion. That hurdle helped me have a long look at my roots.
How does this personal history come through in your practice? With my work I am looking at ways of communing with plant life. Painting slows down this thinking and points to the way the plants make us feel. In fact, it’s all about relationships, as most living beings, humans, animals and plants, are gendered, their actions driven by reproductive urge. This everybody killing everybody hostility does not exist to the extent in the plant relationships. So I look to this kind of plant being that represents 85% of life on the planet. With the current ecological crisis and the end of the world as we know it, plants have a lot more to say on current progressive concerns about solidarity and mutual help. We forget that life depends on nutrition and most plants are autotrophs – that transform non-life (extra-terrestrial light) matter into nutrition, while rest -heterotroph (can not produce its own food) – depend on consuming other organic carbon matter generated by other life forms. As we used to think of our world as the garden, in fact the plants are gardeners themselves – as they in their nutrition process, plants transform light from space to produce oxygen – producers that makes all life possible. Even if we go into space, we need to bring plants with us (think Martian). With every breath we take, every sip of tea, every brushstroke is a point of meditation on this interdependent relationship, on this sense of interconnectedness through consumption/nourishment with the rest of life forms. This plant abundance (to the point of obscenity) offers us a new model for coexistence and mutual nourishment.
Having given birth to a child I particularly relate to this nurturing and interdependence idea. And even though certain feminist thought negates this particular relationship with nature of women as mothers, unthinking matter (which Mancuso claims is intelligence of expansive vs. focused form) – I choose Luce Irigaray’s stand on this: to determine for myself what it should be.
There is this moral conflict between need for consumption that comes from assumption of the goodness of nature. (There is projection of moral perfection on nature – cosmogony -garden of eden- of hierarchy where man is its greatest artwork, master ) The circular nature of this interconnectedness presumes constant flow. Our very species is metamorphosis of previous species (Darwin) and we change a little with every cycle. We are part of natural selection/survival of the fittest -selection by other life forms (bees as well as humans). I am negotiating this plant-human relationship through exploring cultural constructs around nourishment – into contemporary wellness and is all about consuming drinks, potions, tonics, elixirs, also health food, skin care, hair, nails, things you wear, spaces occupy – everything you attend to for increasing one’s sexual attraction, fitness, claiming one’s place under the sun. I am seduced and repelled by it at the same time. So art is employed here as a tool, to turn it upside down and have wellness feed the art, blurring the boundaries between subject and object.
What about the formal side of your painting? With the development of the participatory side of the practice, the rhythm of my work became somewhat seasonal, the festival I curate annually being held at midsummer – am me taking all the conversations, thoughts and imagery generated back to the studio to think through in paint. Painting became a way of slowing down that lived experience and thinking through it, not just reproducing, articulating through line and gesture and colour. Painting is a formal way to think through how we exist in the world. I am thinking of us being porous and one penetrate the other – how we are influenced by our environment, as if boundary crossing between the people and the plants. I aim to represent metamorphosis from plants into humans back into plants in a powerful and convincing way. Intentionally in the paintings the plants take on fleshy colours and the flesh turns blue and green, cancelling out each other but also celebrating/glamourising the relationship, akin to orthodox icon adornment.
I see my painting as a temporary stored energy of that lived experience that needs a release. It’s like a battery that stores sunlight/energy flow for a little or a while. That’s why there always seems to be a narrative and tension in the painting, This is my way of rediscovering the relationship between subject and materiality, that perhaps needs to be balanced out more away form the subject and more towards pure painting so that there is equality where one does not dominate the other.
Attempting at self-awareness, I am grappling with the problem of paint’s ability to render life in one go, as if holding that thought or tracing memory into a rectangle. Figuration in my work refers to a line of enquiry, preserved in the communist east, which perversely continued western atelier traditions. The terms and the bag of tricks that come with figuration is what makes it an interesting puzzle – that living depth that I am after, that requires lots of time to render and I am trying to challenge that. Every new painting is a slightly different way of solving this problem and it suddenly evolves into a body of work. Isolation was good for me conceptually and formally nourishing – a chance to look back at the things I was interested in and have done in the last five years and re-learning the set of skills I’ve gained in the progress. This focus enhanced the awareness of the evolution of my work and the importance of looking for that place of balance always. I am looking to the work of/building on the historical legacy of such artists as Karen Kilimnik, Ferelai Baez, Rachel Feinstein and Kiki Smith.
Is your work narrative and how do you use language? Even though the knowledge of spells has not been handed down to me by my great grandmother, I title the paintings with the hopeful potential of a spell ( spell is also called ‘glamour’, in old english: grammar, in sense of ‘knowledge’) – my attempt at future world building. Glamour in its antiquated interpretation, not the glitz, as my taste has also been more Bruegel less Velasquez. I am drawn to everyday narrative, genre painting, simple lived experience. Therefore the size and the crudeness of my paintings – whatever I can do in one day to capture that feeling. Ultimately it is about the way that subject matter and the painting makes you feel.
I also like to see how people make their take on the narrative and after the viewer moves on and the story transforms with the interpretation. I studied linguistics briefly in college but dropped it promptly as painting felt as a more direct form of communication.