Working on New Body of Works

During the preparations for exhibitions and choosing the space for the Bachelor's exhibition, I realised something: the only true happiness for me is still the studio. That’s the place where I feel free. I can really be myself there, more than 100%. I can just let everything go.

One of the most important works that I made was the Silent Chorus.

It’s this completely black work made from newspapers. This piece became really personal, and I thought it should definitely be in my exhibition.

I had this “black” inside me for a long time. It was heavy, and I needed to bring it out. But I never had the time to finish it. And when I finally did it, something inside me became lighter. I felt more at peace.

Also, now, I see the colour fields more like recordings of my inner feelings. I still call them colour fields, but they’re really about emotions. About what I feel inside my body. It is a feeling in the form of a rectangle.

At the same time, I was working on my paintings.

I really wanted to push the painting medium forward, to try and say something deep on a flat surface, only through brush strokes and the behaviour of the paint. But it was very difficult. Sometimes I thought a work was finished, but I didn’t feel satisfied inside. And for me, the feeling is everything.

One exciting direction was integrating my broken plywood or wooden elements into the canvas actually screwing them onto the surface. Again, it created a strong contrast: the raw, broken wood next to the noble oil paint. Oil is expensive, elegant, it has a long history. And the wood is something rough, broken, even from the streets. This contradiction is very strong for me.

One painting that really worked for me was called NA DACHE. It has the words: PATRIOT, MED (honey), MOLOKO (milk).

Description for the social media:

"На даче (At the Dacha)" explores the intersection of nostalgia, national identity, and materiality. The text on the wooden panels - "патриот" (patriot) on the lighter one and "мёд, молоко" (honey, milk) on the darker one - evokes both Soviet-era slogans and deeply embedded cultural symbols. This contrast between rough, broken materials and the fluidity of paint speaks to the tension between collective memory and personal perception, between the ideals associated with home (the dacha) and the fragmented realities that shape them. The scratched wooden surfaces reference my ongoing exploration of destruction, reconstruction, and affect, drawing parallels to my sculptural works and newspaper-based pieces. The layering of textures is an analysis of the material and the ephemeral; it questions what remains permanent in our shifting historical and emotional landscapes.

This piece became very personal. It’s connected to my father, to my childhood, and my past. There’s also a scratching element in it, like I’m scratching a wound. Like blood can come out. And when I scratch the Russian words into the wood, it feels painful. The wood itself reminds me of Russian culture. It’s strong and natural, but also broken.

I made another work with canvas and wood together, with the words: BOLOTO (swamp), MOST (bridge), and NEODNAZNACHNO (ambiguous). This last word became very important for me. It’s the word that propaganda often uses. They put everything into doubt, even simple things. Like, “The grass is green - but it’s neodnaznachno.” They create confusion.

When I showed these works, the reactions were very different. Many people don’t want to connect with politics right now. When they see something political, they quickly step back. I tried to include these pieces in upcoming exhibitions, but they were refused. I don’t think it's because they are bad works, I think it’s because of the political topics.

There are still many works I haven’t finished yet. I’m still trying to find the right way to mix the wooden elements with the strong brush strokes. I even started to analyse my compositions more. But it’s still not easy.

I continued working with my colour field series and started experimenting, trying to combine newspaper colour fields with painting.

I pushed this idea, but in the end, the feeling just wasn’t right. It didn’t work. So I destroyed it.

The same happened with one sculpture.

I believe I won’t push it further. I simply don’t have a solution for it now. Maybe I will just let it ‘stand’ (in real hang) and wait for its moment.

There’s also another work with wooden elements integrated into it,  but again, it doesn’t feel right. The energy doesn’t flow.

I kept thinking about how I can bring the wooden elements further into my work. I noticed that I feel the strongest connection when the top part of the painting is a newspaper colour field, and the bottom part is made with organised wooden elements, almost like Louise Nevelson. But even then, it’s not always easy to find the balance.

I also tried to build a frame for one of the works by myself. I liked it a lot, it was pure and rough, and for me it was important because it contrasted with the fragile surface of the newspaper. But I heard one customer say during an exhibition: “If this work had a different frame, it would be so much better.”

And honestly, that just killed me. I felt that people were missing the point of these creative, rough frames. But still, I will see how things develop.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how commercial exhibitions and customer expectations influence artists. I’ve taken part in several exhibitions where I noticed how people reacted to different types of work.

For example, I’ve seen how broken, rough, or politically uncomfortable artworks that I find very powerful are often not appreciated by the general audience.

At one art fair, I observed how people talked negatively about more controversial or “dirty” artworks, even though the quality was high. In contrast, the more neutral, decorative, and “flowery” pieces got a lot of attention and compliments.

This made me think: If I want to survive as an artist, I need to sell my work to pay for my studio, materials, and daily life. But to sell, it often feels like I have to adapt my work to what the customer wants to see. That’s a hard realisation, because the work I feel most connected to, the more difficult or political pieces, don’t usually attract buyers.

So I’m left with a dilemma: Should artists split their practice into two parts, one that is more commercial, easier to digest, and helps pay the bills, and another that is more critical, more personal, and maybe shown only in institutional contexts or kept as a form of self-expression?

It doesn’t feel right.

Even if you manage to find a balance between the two, the final artwork is still influenced by what the market wants. Because to make the kind of art you really believe in, you first need to be seen as an artist. For that, you need exhibitions. To get exhibitions, you often need a gallery. And for the gallery to take you on, they need to see your work as a product they can sell.

It’s a closed circle  one that feels almost impossible to break.

Coming back to the nice things, something really exciting happened.

I was going through my studio, and I noticed I had so many old newspapers from my previous works, leftovers that I had saved for recycling. These boxes were just standing there, and every time I looked at them, I thought I needed to do something.

So I decided to go for a new experiment. I shredded the newspaper, put it into water, mixed it with colour, and started forming something new.

My first test was to make a kind of vase using a metal grid as a structure.

Inside, I placed some wooden elements to help hold the form, and then I added the wet newspaper mix around it.

It took a long time to dry, but in the end, it became a vase. And the result was fascinating.

I continued with more tests, and each new vase came out better than the one before. I tried different supports.

One time, I used an old unburned clay vase and covered it with newspaper pulp. But it felt too symmetric, too controlled. That one didn’t work for me.

Then I thought: what if the vase has no inside elements of my old colour fields? Can it stand hollow? I tried it, and the result was even better.

I realised that placing the wooden sticks inside in a random, clumsy way actually gave me exactly the kind of fragile structure I wanted.

предназначение - purpose, традиция - tradition, неоднозначно - ambiguous

I started adding scratched words into the holes of these vases. At first, I thought the vases needed to be filled with something. But as more vases came out, I started asking myself:

Why do I do this?

What does this mean?

And then I understood.

The vase is me.

It’s a vessel. But it doesn’t hold water, so it has no "real" function anymore. And I started reflecting deeply, because I cannot have a child, and that sometimes makes me feel like I’m not a woman in the traditional sense. I cannot give life, I cannot give my beloved husband a child, a continuation of us.

But still, the vase holds something. And that something is very personal. The little wooden sticks I place inside remind me of my childhood, rebuilding old furniture in my father's shed in our Dacha. These vessels became self-portraits, full of memory and emotion. They are fragile, but they still hold something. Even if that something is uncertain.

Alongside my new experiments, I was also busy framing my works for the various exhibitions happening during this time. Strangely, this process of choosing frames, preparing the works for public presentation, helped me think more deeply about how my works are seen, how they function in space, and how people read them. It made me more sensitive to the act of exhibiting itself.

While working, I also began noticing a formal connection between my oil paintings and the paper works.

At first glance, they might seem very different, but I started to see that my brush strokes and the textured surfaces created by glued newspaper carried a similar rhythm, a similar gesture. This realisation made me feel that my practice is more unified than I had thought, just expressed through different materials.

At the same time, I was thinking seriously about applying for a Master’s degree. I visited the Open Day at HBK Saarbrücken, our local art university. I walked through the studios, saw the students’ works, and felt a mix of excitement and doubt. On one hand, I thought: maybe this could be something for me. They even had a small ceramics studio, which really surprised me because it was so small and quiet, almost hidden. The fact that ceramics kept appearing in my mind might be why I started working on these vases with newspaper pulp. They are not ceramics, but they echo the form and symbolism of it. Maybe it’s my own kind of ceramics.

During that visit, I had the chance to speak with Professor Katharina Hinsberg. I actually knew her work already and appreciated her delicate approach with paper. I was excited to get feedback from her. But what followed shocked me.

After looking at my portfolio, she said, “Your works are already finished. What do you want here?” I told her that I still had many questions about my sculptures, about paintings, about their connection, and I want to go deeper, not only in practice but also in writing and thinking. Her response was: “I don’t understand what you need here. You're already exhibiting. You’ve already achieved what you want.”

I felt dismissed, as if she was telling me what I want, without even listening to what I said. She added that if I joined their program, I would need to “reset everything to zero.” And I thought: what does that mean? Should I throw away 13 years of work and start from zero just for the sake of it?

But still, I was open to change. If I came there, it would already mean I’m open to rethinking, to breaking things down and building again. I left the meeting feeling completely frustrated and just walked away with my portfolio. I knew I will not study at this university.

Later, when I talked to other artists and friends, I started to realise something else. Maybe the problem wasn’t with my work, but with how I presented it. Perhaps for a master’s application, I shouldn’t show everything - exhibitions, CV full of experience. Maybe I should create a different kind of portfolio, one that shows more questions than conclusions.

Even though the experience hurt, and she was not nice in her communication, it gave me a lot to reflect on. It made me think not only about how I present myself, but also how institutions see artists and how strange it is that someone else would tell me I’ve already arrived when I feel like I’m just beginning.

Anyway, I was so excited about my vases that I came back to the studio and forgot about this lady.

These sculptural vases, part vessel, part ruin, part construction...

I uploaded photos to Chat GPT and here we are:

Conceptual Reflection

These forms seem to resist a singular identity. They echo the shape of traditional vessels, objects of containment, protection, or offering, but they are broken, open, interrupted by intrusions of wood, full of inner scaffolding, like collapsed shelters or fossilised memories.

They might be seen as "failed containers" — trying to hold, but also exposing. This echoes your ongoing interest in the tension between exterior and interior — what’s shown versus what’s hidden, permanence versus ephemerality. The outside, rough and crusted like dried earth or worn-out pulp, feels like a hardened skin. Inside, there’s a surprising complexity: wooden structures, painted surfaces, yellowish tones bleeding in — like a nervous system or an unfinished architecture of feeling.

These pieces embody a kind of emotional archaeology. They feel like relics dug up from a recent catastrophe or a distant memory. The rough texture — shredded paper and pigment — reminds us of discarded information, forgotten news, fragments of narratives. The inner wooden structures seem like a support system, or even a failed attempt at repair, speaking to a deeper emotional fragility.

Material and Process

The use of newspaper pulp connects directly with your ongoing themes of mass media, temporality, and collective memory. Newspapers age quickly, become irrelevant, yet here they are stabilized into something sculptural—transformed into a form that is both permanent and perishable.

The yellow pigment might reference emotion, decay, even warning or toxicity, but also warmth and light. It transitions from the base upwards, like something that is either growing or being consumed—possibly both. The color evokes a bodily, almost sickly vitality, which fits with your idea of "gut feeling"—the unconscious, instinctive responses that are hard to verbalize but shape how we perceive the world.

Inside, the wooden construction introduces a different kind of material logic: cold, rational, almost like scaffolding or support beams. But here, they’re warped, misaligned—like logic breaking down under pressure. The structure becomes emotional, irrational, a nervous wreck disguised as geometry.

Emotional and Philosophical Meaning

These are vessels of instability. They don't only hold space; they tell stories of things falling apart and being stitched together again. They are forms that question what it means to contain emotion, memory, or identity in an era where everything feels unstable, manipulated, and disposable.

If we relate this to your research on affect, they’re containers of "pre-cognitive tension"—objects that evoke a gut-level response before we fully understand what we’re looking at. They’re seducing and unsettling at once—fragile yet aggressive, wounded yet standing.

They also align beautifully with your exploration of how art can provoke transformation on a visceral level—they’re not didactic or clear, but they stir something deep and uncertain.