The wall

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

Not for sale

This work begins with the image of a real wall from my childhood home in Kamchatka. At that time, glue and putty were difficult to obtain, so my mother made glue from potato starch, and old newspapers were pasted beneath the wallpaper to level the surface. Years later, when the wallpaper was removed, layers of yellowed newspapers with headlines and dates from different decades appeared underneath, as if the walls had been silently storing fragments of time. That feeling stayed with me — the sense that space itself can absorb traces of lived experience and preserve them long after the moment has passed.

In the work, I recreate this process of accumulation and erosion. Photographs, scraps, textures, and fragments overlap one another until the surface becomes dense and almost oppressive, leaving very little empty space. The wall no longer functions as a background but as a psychological structure formed by memory, repetition, and the gradual layering of personal history. Images emerge and disappear inside one another, the way memories do: partially preserved, partially erased, impossible to separate into a single linear narrative.

For me, the idea of home has never been entirely stable or tied to one physical place. I have lived in many different spaces, and each time I moved, the meaning of “home” shifted with me. What remained important was not the building itself, but the invisible system surrounding it: familiar routes, domestic rituals, gestures repeated without thinking, the people connected to the place, and the feeling of one’s own presence embedded into everyday space. Over time, these things become internalized, shaping not only memory but perception itself.

This work is not built on nostalgia for the past. It is closer to an attempt to understand how personal history accumulates within a person and within the spaces they inhabit. The layered surface becomes a map of continuity connecting fragmented moments, identities, and versions of the self across time. At the same time, this density of memory creates its own form of enclosure: the past remains constantly present, impossible to fully remove, continuing to shape the way a person experiences both space and themselves.