An interview taken from our new digital issue. Ohii Katya, a self-taught Ukrainian artist currently residing in Rome, Italy, thrives in creating immersive installations, sculptures, and performances. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for her craft, her work transcends boundaries and stimulates the senses. In this exclusive interview, we delve deep into Ohii Katya’s artistic journey, the influence of her heritage, and the captivating world she creates.
Your work has a truly mesmerizing quality. Can you share your artistic influences and how they shape your creative process?
I would say nature, which is constantly changing, mutating, taking on bizarre and sometimes grotesque forms. It’s so familiar, but at the same time inexplicable and often frightening. It is a main source of inspiration for me and shaped my interest in a central topic in my practice – metamorphosis and the allure of the odd.
Your heritage plays a significant role in your artistic expression. How does Ukraine, your home country, inspire and inform your work, even while being based in Rome?
The place we live in creeps into our pores most efficiently through the small details of everyday life, changing us and, of course, influencing everything we do.
For me, it was the contrast between the baroque, blooming forest and the faceless walls of the buildings. It was the fairytales grandmothers told me, filled with magic.
It was the constantly changing and economically unstable atmosphere of my childhood. I was also influenced by friends and family members, each original in their way, like book characters.
I feel inspired by the cosy rainy greyness of an autumn morning when you can put on headphones and walk the familiar concrete for hours, while your brain explodes with creative ideas. Spring and summer with their incredible air, as bright and short as a flash, when you live an intense life for a short period, you gain more impressions and get prepared to fall into the white coma of winter with its tasty hot tea.
Immersive installations are a prominent aspect of your artistic repertoire. Could you tell us more about the experience you aim to create for viewers and the emotions you hope to evoke?
I like creating realms and bringing people in. I am happy to immerse the viewer and their senses by travelling through these fairytale terrains. I am very curious how the repetitive patterns, and the rituals we do influence our consciousness. I am attracted to the odd, unknown, and mysterious. I am fascinated by nature. An old memory comes to mind: I lived next to a fairly large forest. Being a kid, I used to play one game with my friends.
When it was getting dark, we sneaked to the border where the forest began. Lots were drawn and the one who lost had to go into the depths alone, as far as their courage would let them while the rest waited outside.
The forest hung like a solid impenetrable wall. The trees were tall. The darkness in the depths was so black and dense, it even seemed tangible. And when you entered it, your child’s brain began to draw all the most unimaginable things and creatures that could hide in there. You feel you are completely alone, and even if you start screaming, your friends will run away.
You are pierced by a numbing fear, not of a specific danger but of the unknown. Nature, of which you are a part, seems alien, inexplicable, almost divine as if you are faced with a completely different logic that you cannot understand. You want to simultaneously run away and climb deeper into this impenetrable forest, merge with it. There for the first time,
I had an acute feeling of something weird, odd, present in nature, and therefore in ourselves, in our bodies. Maybe I am always trying to recreate that forest in different ways within my art.
Sculpture is another medium where your talent shines. Can you explain the connection between the physical presence of your sculptures and the conceptual ideas behind them?
The main theme behind my art is the process of metamorphosis. Sculptural pieces represent the hybrid entities in a certain phase of their persistent formation as if we could witness a greatly speeded-up evolutionary process, occurring right before our eyes. Imagine the movement, the boiling mass, the constant growth, as if something was tearing the fleshy vessel from the inside, or, on the contrary, twisting and sapping it.
When I thought about this, an image came to mind of how clumps of obscure substance, either liquid or viscous, were sprouting out tearing the body or a surface, how the number of limbs was increasing and decreasing, how they changed size and structure.
Now imagine it as a video sequence, where you pick only one frame from the ongoing process, where the process of change is frozen in time.
I guess somehow similar to how we observe the mutation and evolution of a species, everything is changing, but the timing of this change is so slow for us as if we were able to see only that one frame from a video sequence for a lifetime.
Read the full interview here:
FOLLOW OHII ON INSTAGRAM @OHIIKATYA TO KEEP UP WITH THE LATEST ARTWORK. WWW.OHIIKATYA.COM
