my heart inside a shell
site-specific installation
media: video, sound, objects (paper, printing, river pearls, natural materials), photography.
location: Severodvinsk Museum of Local Lore
The village is a disappearing place as well as a pearl shell, which you could find in large numbers in the northern rivers in ancient times.
This gentle shellfish is a girl in a shell, hiding behind her window wings, lying at the bottom of the river, raising her children from grains of sand, which end up becoming an ornament for a girl from the river bank.
I go by train, I walk, I make my way through the forest, I walk along the shore, I cross the river by boat, I walk, I climb a mountain and go down it, I walk through a field and here I am – in a place hidden from the whole world, where I will be like a pearl in a shell.
In the project «my heart is inside a shell», the artist works with the image of a pearl clam, using an installation as a language with components including such instruments as sound and video, photography, as well as pearls. The associative series in the work is multilayered: there is a comparison between the village and this type of a shell, which are both now on the verge of extinction. The artist also explores the image of remote places hidden from the rest of the world, as if being behind the shutters, and the image of the pearl as being part of the feminine world.
The project was carried-out during an in-residence program of Maryin Dom in the village of Chakola and Nenoksa in the Arkhangelsk region.
2021
an untitled
board found on the shore of Lake Onega, river pearls
size: 109х21cм
self-portrait
paper, print, spruce needles
The child's game of dressing up a paper doll or portrait of a delicate mollusk that hides behind the folds of its shell.
The first fold is a window in the house or a gate on an icon, the divine world.
The second fold is a girl-avatar who can be and travel in the space of old photographs. She is like a famous beauty from a northern village, but her clothes are woven not from threads, but from pieces of the place. The world is semi-real, semi-fairy-tale past.
The third fold is me hiding. Part of me is present everywhere, but only partially. The world of the present.
a series of objects
shells from the Pinega River, river pearls. 15 x 9cm
my jewel is the guiding stars – pearls, reflected from the bottom of the sea in the sky. And at the bottom of the sea is not sand, but salt.
Untitled
Book
Series of photographs,
Print on plastic,
Fabric with prints of forest berries, embroidery
23 x 19cm
In the disappearing village, I heal the wounds of houses with pearls.
Here in the forest, silent creatures - trees and anthills wear snow-white necklaces.
a series of objects
plexiglass, fabric, printing on plastic, thread
18x30cm
