about
Expanding painting practice to sound, performance, dance, film and installation, I approach it as a ritual of reconnection with nature and my ancestry.
Painting remains an anchor point for my work. Honoring Nihonga’s traditional use of pigment, water and animal glue, I then abandon the brushwork in its entirety, manipulating the paint on the surface with my body movements and gravity.
Informed by laws of motion and natural weathering events, I have developed and built a kinetic sonic painting machine that acts as a mediator. Moving in unison, in a trance-like, perpetual motion, the machine becomes my somatic extension. Together, we transmit soundscapes through a multiplicity of layered marks across the painting surface. With this ritualistic dance, I investigate the destructive and regenerative qualities of violence, looking for a way to recalibrate the psyche toward a more harmonious resonance with the rhythms of nature.
CV
Elena Shkvarkina (1988, Moscow) is a Russian-British multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. She is pursuing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2025).
EDUCATION
2024-2025 Royal College of Art (MA Painting)
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
19-22 June 2025 Degree show, Painting building, Battersea campus, Royal College of Art, London
PAST EXHIBITIONS
2025 The Fall of Icarus, Upper Gulbenkian Gallery, London, 7-10 May
2025 Ancestral Utopias, SustainLab (Co-curator & Artist), Hangar Gallery, London, 29 April - 2 May
2024 Tiny Show, Crit Room, The Royal College of Art, London, December
2024 Pure Land, The Sky Lounge (Co-curator & Artist), Thames City, London, 25 January
2023 The Brink, group exhibition, Tiderip (Co-curator & Artist), Ugly Duck, London, 7-9 October
2023 The Passerby Who Stays, Inspirer Hub, 48 Piccadilly, London, 20-21 May