about
Expanding painting practice to sound, performance, film and installation, Elena Shkvarkina approaches it as a ritual of reconnection with nature and her ancestry.
Painting remains an anchor point for her work. While honouring Nihonga’s traditional use of pigments, she abandons the brushwork, manipulating the paint on the surface with her body movements.
She devises sonic painting machines that act as her somatic extension. Informed by laws of motion and natural weathering events, she moves in a trance-like, ritualistic dance, which manifests in ridges of texture and metallic, rumbling soundscapes. Drawing parallels between the rotation of Earth and the gentle rocking of a child in its parent's arms, she is looking for a way to recalibrate the psyche toward healing and a more harmonious relationship with nature.
‘What is it in the movement and sound that brings solace to the mind and body? Can they provide a dimension of seeing and communicating across spacetime? Can they heal?’
CV
Elena Shkvarkina (1988, Moscow, Russia)
EDUCATION
2025 Royal College of Art (MA Painting)
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
15-19 July 2025 Still Flows, RuptureXIBIT, 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 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