Elena Gileva

Dates of residency: January till February 2018
Born: 1992
Nationality: Russian
Lives and works: London, UK
Education:
 2016 MA Ceramics and Glass, Royal College of Art
2013 BFA, Parsons Paris School of Art and Design
Selected shows
2020 London Art Fair. White Conduit Projects. London
2020 Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Ghent, Belgium
2019 Nakanojo Biennial 2019. Nakanojo, Gunma, Japan
2017 Cultural Landscape, Part 2, Gallery de l'ancienne poste, Toucy

The Residency
While at BAR, Elena Gileva developed a series called ‘Archeology of a moment’. The works she presents symbolizes the ‘Remains of a subjective perception - Ruins of present labour’. Her work table is laid out with shards of the making, remains of the process that create the landscape of a personal museum. “I work through the references of the far and recent past, piled as layers of archeological strata scattered around the contemporary landscape of identities and cultures. Drawing on the multiplicity of the references I intertwine them like coils of clay and create an impostor archeology of my own.”

The Artist 
Elena Gileva’s work explores the decorative, historical, and ornamental through the medium of sculpture. Her fascination lies with the language and history of objects. A myriad of references underpin the work but the artist’s interest in Russian folklore is key to understanding her practice. Archetypal functional objects—pots, jars, pillars—are reworked until they take on new colours, shapes and stories. Transmutation is a central motif in Russian folk stories in which frogs turn into princesses, boys into goats and women into swans. In Gileva’s work this is a recurrent process; clay becomes form, craft becomes art, the past becomes present and the present past, and reality and fantasy flow in and out of each other.