Naia Viaznikova
Statement
In my practice, I create spaces of silence and slowed perception - spaces in which familiar reality temporarily becomes less stable. I’m interested in the moment when the familiar can no longer be perceived unambiguously, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the human and the natural become permeable.
One source of this interest is a personal experience. As a child, I sometimes sleepwalked, experiencing a sense of being simultaneously here and somehow elsewhere. I used to find this state strange and unsettling, but over time I came to see it as a particular mode of perception - a state of quiet presence and a certain detachment from the surrounding space. Today, I don’t seek to depict this state literally, but rather to create its visual equivalent and allow the viewer to enter it for a while.
At the core of my imagery are processes of gradual transformation. A house becomes part of a forest, a human figure dissolves into plant forms, an animal turns into a flower, and a landscape begins to be perceived as an inner space. I’m interested not in the final transformation, but in the transitional moment when one form has already begun to become another while retaining a trace of its original state.
I work with acrylic, pastel, and charcoal, creating layered surfaces where the image simultaneously emerges, disappears, and changes. Blurred boundaries, overlapping forms, and varying degrees of visibility become part of the process of perception itself: the viewer first recognizes something familiar and then becomes less certain of what exactly they are seeing.
My works exist between figure and space, the real and the imagined, presence and absence. Through the gradual transformation of form, I seek to create spaces in which the gaze slows down, familiar boundaries become less defined, and the viewer can simply remain within the image for a while.
