My grandmother died of clinical depression before she was even thirty. A year earlier, her husband passed away, and she could not survive the loss. In our childhood, we were told: "she died of love." My mother was only five years old back then, and together with her younger brother, she ended up in an orphanage. All of grandmother Anya’s belongings, photographs, and even her grave were lost in the Vyatka region. My mother does not remember her face—only one photograph survived, taken during the funeral, where my grandmother lies in the image of a bride of Christ.
This story became the foundation for the Still life project. When no belongings are left of a person, it feels as if the memory of them vanishes too. In an attempt to restore contact with the grandmother I never knew, I began creating portrait-still lifes on fabric. I studied photographs from the 1930s—the years of my grandmother's youth—folding human gestures out of clothing and drawing portraits of people without people.
In the process, this personal series grew into a profound conversation about death—the kind of death that does not deny the complexity of existence, but makes us alive and returns value to every lived day. The work "Bride" is iconic in the series. It symbolically echoes both the joy of a woman marrying for love, and how unexpectedly this can turn into the posthumous image of the bride of Christ from my grandmother’s only photo.
It seems to me sometimes that inanimate things can tell us more about humanity than images of people themselves.
