Artist Statement

My work begins with experiences that are difficult to name directly - silence, memory, vulnerability, rupture, longing, waiting, and the subtle internal shifts that follow change.
I am less interested in illustrating these states than in allowing them to become physical. Working across painting, mixed media, relief and sculpture, I build surfaces through layering, concealment, fracture and exposure. Material is not simply a support for an image; it carries pressure, memory and time.
Faces recur throughout my practice because they can hold contradiction without explanation. A face can remain almost still and yet contain fear, absence, resistance, tenderness or transformation. I am drawn to the tension between what is visible and what remains withheld.
A distinctive element of my visual language is a self-developed process for creating raised, thread-like structures from my own modelling mixture. These are not textile threads and they are not decorative lines. Built slowly by hand, often through repeated applications of material and colour, they can move across the surface or remain suspended between a sculptural form and its surrounding ground. They become routes, veins, roots, scars or currents - physical traces of connection, tension, memory and inner movement.
Experimentation is central to my process. Earlier mask studies made with earth, coffee, ash, plaster gauze and heavily textured surfaces gradually led towards the quieter pale reliefs of the Inward Light series. Through these works, I became increasingly interested in how little a face needs in order to carry emotional weight, and how silence itself can become a presence.
I do not see painting and sculpture as separate languages. I am interested in the point where image becomes object, where surface becomes skin, boundary, fracture or shelter, and where something internal begins to emerge into physical space.
My work is ultimately concerned with trace - what remains after an experience has passed. I want the material to hold what cannot be fully explained: not as narrative, but as residue; not as illustration, but as presence.
What I Feel When I Create
Creating is a way of giving form to what cannot always be spoken. I work intuitively, allowing material, texture and gesture to lead the process. Each work begins with an inner impulse and gradually becomes something physical - a trace of memory, emotion and transformation.
“Art begins where words become insufficient. I give form to what remains unspoken.”
— Marina Iljusina