In Conversation with Anastasia Shulman
Courtesy of the artist.
Could you tell us a bit about your background and your current artistic practice?
I’m an Eastern European artist. Born in Moscow, Russia in 2003 and grew up in Minsk, Belarus. I studied for two years at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow, then came to London at nineteen to finish my BA in Fine Art, and I’m now on the MA in Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins. Half my time goes into making work and the other half into writing about why anyone makes anything at all. The two halves argue constantly. It’s useful, but anxiety-inducing.
The work itself is mostly drawing - pastel, graphite and dry media on paper, and more recently larger pieces in mixed media on fabric (but those are on the experimental side). ‘Chirography’, one of my biggest projects, is ongoing. Throughout the series, I create surfaces that carry the appearance of writing with no readable message in them, scratched back into the pastel and hemmed in by colour frames. I curate as well - comes from making art and studying art, as well as being part of the community. The art community that is.
What draws you to the visual appearance of writing, and to the illegibility of language?
These notions come into my practice through family values. My mother is a philologist. Well, to be more precise - her education was in teaching and philology. Naturally, languages became the central thing that I was taught during my pre-school years. My relationship with mom was tense, though. You know how it goes with Slavic parents, ha-ha. To prove my worth in the family, in a way, I made language studies one of my main interests through middle school and high school.
Knowing my way around the applicability of different language structures day-to-day, different types of journalism, and creative writing fascinated me. My other interest was fine art - drawing, to be more precise. So, I think, what happened is - text and forms of text seeped into the drawing process and they became intertwined in my brain and on paper.
There is another note on language - the illegibility of language, to be exact, and why I started looking into it in the first place. While my main language was always Russian, I doubt that there is any Russian blood in me whatsoever - there is a mix of mostly Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Polish blood in me, which makes the question of language very ambivalent to my self-identification. This is where my interest in studying language societally stems from - the question of ‘why language?’, which later transforms into ‘how language?’ and ‘why language?’ I started looking at these questions philologically, but later my work became informed by semiotics (shapes and meanings of signs, eg. letters) and epistemology (why and how language is studied).
Anastasia Shulman, Chirography series, 2024. Pencil, oil pastels.
Repetition plays a fundamental role in your practice. How does working through continual gestures affect your relationship with time, attention and the act of making?
Well, people tend to assume that repetition is calming. You know, colouring, knitting - all of those activities are considered meditative and grounding. For me it’s the opposite - very hectic, and I come out of a session more anxious than I went into it. Repeating a gesture doesn’t empty my head, it makes me think more, and I end up untangling things I hadn’t planned to touch. By the end of a session it has usually narrowed into one specific route of thinking, one particular mindset. Sometimes that’s a good place to land, sometimes it isn’t. You never know which, which also sets me off, but that’s the part I like.
The anxiety comes from what the work actually is, I think. It isn’t about the free flow of the hand, it’s not writing as release, because the writing - the ‘text’ is hemmed in by the painting’s colour frames. It keeps the appearance of language, going nowhere, held inside a border, which builds tension, both in the process of making, and in looking at the outcome.
You have spoken about boredom in your work. How do you understand its relationship to productivity and creativity, particularly in today’s fast-paced world?
A fast life takes the space away from background thinking - we distract ourselves with anything now, people turn on video and audio content when they clean, while they cook, never mind everything else. While it does feel harmless, it steals an enormous amount of time from your own thoughts that would happen automatically in the back of your head otherwise. I believe that that time is crucial to one’s life - it’s where you invent things, and it’s where you think through whatever is difficult. One has to chew things over, regurgitate thoughts. Without those hours nothing gets processed - it just sits there.
Boredom, for me, is what that time feels like from the inside, therefore, never empty, it’s where most of the thinking happens. My work gives me that time back - it was taken from me, and the studio is how I take it back.
The process of repetition helped develop it - I did a project in 2023, where I developed pieces that served as ‘measures’ for the materials I used. I would take a pencil and see how much of a sheet of paper I could cover before I ran out of it. Then I came across pastels, which made the production process easy - a stick of oil pastel is very easy to run out of. I quickly noticed that with pastels, the process of mark-making is reversible and could be doubled - they are easily ‘scratchable’. Do you remember those ‘scratch-away’ painting kits that you could get at DIY stores and kid’s supermarket sections? This technique is called ‘sgraffito’ in art terms.
I later used this knowledge in ‘Chirography’, not only to add visual depth to the work, but to add the idea of ‘concealing’, even ‘censoring’ parts of the imaginary text. This structure visually supports the idea of text as something being studied, not medium through which the studying happens.
Courtesy of the artist.
How do materials and color inform your decisions? Do they emerge intuitively in the process, or are they set within a conceptual framework?
Both! The framework comes first - one material, a fixed limit, this surface, and then I stop thinking and work fast. I started studying colour through Albers, mostly. His ‘Interaction of Color’ is the book I keep going back to, because his whole argument is that colour is the most relative medium there is. He claims that it’s deceptive and has no fixed identity, only the one its neighbours give it. See how that works with the idea of my ‘text’ being nonsensical’? However, colour behaves a bit… differently? Albers had students make one colour look like two, and two look like one. It means you can’t decide a colour on its own, you’re deciding a relationship.
‘Homage to the Square’, a series of paintings by Josef Albers, examines colour interactions/relationships hundreds of times over, with only the colour changing in the painting - nothing else. My own frames around the writing come from somewhere near that idea of investigative repetition. Ellsworth Kelly taught me something different - that a colour can be a thing rather than a description of a thing, which is unclear with Albers. He found forms out in the world and flattened them until the colour and the form were the same object.
So the theory sets the terms, and then the hand is quick and fairly stupid about it, in the good sense, which gives me the ‘meditative’ space. In a way, I would rather make three colour decisions and stand behind them than mix fifty and hedge.
What role does the London scene play in your practice, through the people, spaces or conversations you’ve been a part of?
The thing is - I’ve always been fascinated with the western understanding of how concepts can obtain shape and form. And the Western understanding of form - simplicity, reduction, the freedom to let a thing be what it is. Not only does England give me political freedom, it also gives me the freedom of creation - that goes for both the institutions and the scene. The exhibitions that I have had in the UK are a separate form of education as well, take exhibiting at Mall Galleries - your drawing hangs next to someone who’s been at it for forty years, in a room where nobody knows or cares who you are.
What questions are you interested in exploring in future work?
I want to try taking the language out of drawing to find out whether it survives in other materials, as well as whether its meaning changes when transferred to them. I keep thinking about sculpture as something with actual weight and edges. I also want to work with artists who speak languages I don’t, I do suspect that the limit of only speaking two languages (as I do) is doing something to the work that I can’t see from inside it. Someone who reads other alphabets will look at an illegible surface and notice a different set of things missing, etc.
There’s one more idea I keep circling, it’s similar to the one with multiple languages. I want to try handing my question about language to people who don’t work visually at all, but work with other mediums. What I want to ask them to do is give me both a visual output, and the output that they would normally give. I imagine that it would be something close to translation. I give the thing away and see what comes back in a form I would never have made. It’s like I own a methodology and ask other people to try working along its lines.
I also am learning constantly - I read, I go to things, I absorb like a sponge; that’s the other side of being in England - there’s an enormous amount available to learn from!
Read our piece on Shulman's Chirography series here.
Anastasia Shulman, Chirography series, 2024. Pencil, oil pastels, 42x59.4.
