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- Girl by the Sea
Beliaeva Julia
Imagine a riverside or a lake at night. There is an old tree, usually a willow, and a group of young girls resting beneath its silvered crown. The whiteness of their sleeping gowns is softly lit by the moonlight; you can almost smell the gentle fragrance of the flower wreaths in their hair. This is the image of the mermaids deeply engraved in the Ukrainian mind. Sadness, loss, tragedy, and injustice lie at the very core of how we perceive the mermaid of old tales.
And then comes the fear—fear in the face of anger and regret. Because it is the same long hair, once wreathed with the flowers of an innocent girl, that now, down on the riverbed, entangles and holds the feet of a man gasping for his last breath. The mermaid in Ukrainian folklore embodies an unconscious fear of the consequences of wrongdoing. She is the monster born from injustice, driven by grief and the anger of the abused.
Julia Beliaeva was born in 1988 in Haisyn, Vinnytsia region, Ukraine.
2005-2011 Graduated from Kyiv State Institute of Decorative and Applied Art and Design named after Mykhailo Boychuk
“Art heals, reveals all aspects of trauma, from the global to the most intimate and secret. It illuminates the dark places of society, goes down into the basements with a flashlight or powerfully illuminates the entire night-time darkness. Such works are aimed at identifying the pain-complex, both individual and collective. I believe that art liberates, making consciousness clearer and clearer. On a subconscious level, the nightmare becomes less common.”
“We all have traumas. I think my art is about that. Postcolonial trauma, historical or private. But I always tried to find my own way through beauty. Beauty and terror. Its roots.”
Using the latest technologies (3D scanning, 3D modeling, 3D printing and virtual reality), in her work she turns to a rethinking of tradition and traditional media in an ever-changing virtualized world. She is interested in how technology affects us and our consciousness, as well as how the latest technology can make sense and update traditional media. In particular, Julia works a lot with porcelain, which gives her the opportunity to reflect on the heritage and lost traditions through a combination of new technologies and the popular in Ukraine ceramic industry, which is now lost.
