YELENA POPOVA

Rather than treating individual works as self-contained, Popova approaches each project as part of a larger, interconnected body of work, in which earlier elements remain active and reappear in new configurations. She compares the logic behind her practice with garden cultivation – a layered and cyclical process. A recurring concern for Popova is the potency of painting as an artistic medium. Grounded in cross-disciplinary research, her inquiry focuses on its material conditions. She is particularly drawn to the temporal transformations of materials involved in painting, including evaporation, oxidation, and decay, as well as to the dynamics between image, surface, and space.

Moments of Grace features Popova’s Painting Installations series (2012-2017), where painting operates not only as an image but as a physical object in motion. In this project individual canvases lean, overlap, and support one another, forming arrangements that appear precarious yet remain carefully balanced. Each Painting Installation is set through an intuitive and embodied site-specific process that the artist likens to performance or a form of choreography.

In the Evaporating Paintings and Post-Petrochemical Paintings series, Popova explores the chemical components of a painting. Evaporating Paintings point to material changes that evade immediate visibility, such as the gradual oxidation of paint over decades or centuries. By situating these processes beyond the viewer’s temporal horizon, the works invite a durational gaze that runs counter to the demands of the attention economy.

Materiality becomes more explicitly political in Post-Petrochemical Paintings. The series proposes an alternative to the synthetic materials commonly used in painting, such as acrylics, which do not decompose. In response, Popova works with organic substances, including soil and ash, to produce her images. These materials are gathered through fieldwork, often from sites such as former atomic power stations, and so appear as documents of specific industrial landscapes.

Popova’s engagement with tapestry grows out of her interest in the material agency of a canvas within paintings. As she worked more closely with the composition, texture and weave of a canvas, her inquiry extended into textiles, where the image is no longer applied to the surface but is woven into its body. At the same time, the logic of textile- making with its reliance on the grid and precision remains continuous with her approach to painting.

Moments of Grace includes three jacquard-woven tapestries that reflect Popova’s interest in systems of symbolism and codification shared across scientific and mythological forms of knowledge. Fern Flower (2025) takes as its subject a mythical bloom from Eastern European folklore, sought on Midsummer’s night but never found. The black tapestry, I Feel Thy Footsteps with My Skin (2024), draws on the ouroboros – an ancient symbol of cyclical continuity – and on the sensory world of snakes, which perceive through vibration. For Popova, vibration is understood as a form of energy that connects the Earth, its human and non-human inhabitants, and the cosmos, an understanding often found in Quantum Physics as well as mythological worldviews, where such connections are held as sacred.

Ripple-Marked Radiance (after Hertha Ayrton) (2019) was produced in Cambridge and refers to the research notebooks of Hertha Ayrton, one of the first women to study at Girton College. At its centre is an electric arc; below it, patterns of rippled sand. The title of the work is borrowed from Ayrton’s writings that read: ‘A single ripple, existing alone, in otherwise smooth sand, initiates a ripple on either side of it, that each of these ripples produces another on its farther side – these in turn originate on their farther sides, and so on, till the whole sand is ripple- marked.’

courtesy: osnova & Yelena Popova, photos: Enrique Pascual