KHRYSTYNA KHMIL

I am grateful to have had this opportunity to be a resident of Muse for six months. It’s hard to believe that four months have passed since then, but this is one of the best things that has happened to me in the last year. A safe relaxed and liberated environment.

This residency has provided me with interesting interactions between visitors, alongside artists creating with me during the residency and artists who present their work in the gallery. They have organised interesting group trips to other galleries. It was especially interesting to take a trip on an old bus to artist workshops and underground galleries.

The most valuable aspect for me is the opportunity to work on my practice together with my two sons. The openness of artists during dialogue and collaboration, creating small joint practices.

Dialogue with colleagues and visitors during the process of creating a picture and before its completion was interesting and new for me. The first work I produced at the Muse gallery was a collaboration with Eleni Maragaki, she created an impression of a landscape and I complimented them with images of a person who freely, easily and naturally interacted with the landscapes.

The second work is a painting based on a planned yellow-blue sketch about freedom, on a 100 x 150cm sheet. In the process of creating this picture, I relied on my intuition and tried to convey the definition of freedom through images. I worked only with ultramarine and it completely absorbed me.

I felt this process was a state of freedom. However, since I had a planned sketch, I decided to give in to logic and follow it. I added a large female silhouette and yellow colour to the vibrating energy that surrounded the silhouette.

At this stage, I stopped because the work became difficult for me and not as easy as I thought. I realised that I had managed to convey the state of freedom of Ukraine, which is now actively fighting for independence and not the state of human freedom as I wanted from the very beginning. This is why I started working on the third canvas and completely devoted myself to the experimentation and to my own intuition.