The wall

"The wall"
collage, mixed media, 105x90cm (9 pieces, 35×30cm)
2023

Not for sale

When I lived in Kamchatka, we used to wallpaper the walls. It was impossible to get glue and putty then. My mother made glue from potato starch, and old newspapers were used to level the walls, glued under the wallpaper. Everyone did it that way back then.

The house was old, and when we removed the wallpaper, layers of newspapers with headlines and dates from different times were glued to the walls. As if the walls held history. This image of continuity somehow struck a chord with me.

In my work, I start from this image, the accumulation of history from the past to the future. I stylize it using the image of an old wall, peeled off by time, revealing what it had carefully stored under the wallpaper.

«Home – Reflection of Personal History»

I had many places I considered home. I would move to a new place, and the meaning of home would fade away. It became a monument of a home. When I returned to the places I lived before, I always had the feeling that I had come home. But the house itself, the structure where I lived, didn't play a significant role, at least not more than other places dear to me in that area. It's as if the sense of home is smeared and no longer concentrated within the room where I once lived.

I thought for a long time about the attributes of the place that we commonly call "my home," and it turned out to be the following:

• Place: My country, city, district, the building, the space where I live;

• People: The inhabitants of the house. A reflection of my closest social connections;

• Rituals: My route home from the nearest store, how I walk into the kitchen and where I sit, how I fall asleep, where I find the items I need;

• Reflection: A reflection of my habits, domestic preferences, interests, character. My imprint.

It turns out that everything that characterizes a place as "my home" is somehow related to me. Home is a reflection of me and my history. It reflects my path and the connection between the person I was 3-4 years old, from whom I have fragmented memories, to the person I am today. The story is continuous, threading events and states onto the foundation of the past, like annual rings on a tree trunk. It reconciles me with myself. After all, strictly speaking, there isn't much in common between the twenty-year-old me and the me of today, but the story shows me exactly how it happened and why it turned out this way, resolving disagreements.

This story is shaped not only by my home but also by other people, places, and events. In my home, this story is simply most concentrated, and there is a special concept for such a place, although the mechanics don't differ from my favorite park, the university where I studied, or the place where I met my future wife at that time.