Maria Saukhina London, United Kingdom

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Interdisciplinary artist working across performance, painting, and object-making. Body as carrier of memory. Aerial fabrics as material and metaphor. Exploring tension, vulnerability, and transformation through movement and material trace.

My practice sits at the intersection of performance, movement, and visual art. The body is my primary instrument — not as a subject to be represented, but as a space where emotional and existential questions take physical form. I work with aerial fabrics suspended from the ceiling — objects that have accompanied me for years of acrobatic training. These same fabrics appear in my paintings, cut and embedded into canvas. The material carries memory: the grip of hands, the moment before the fall, the tension between holding and letting go. Themes I return to: the duality of support and constraint, the body in systems it cannot fully control, the transformation that comes through rupture and fall. A background in psychology informs how I approach interior experience — how emotions, memory, and hidden conflict surface through the body and become material. For me, performance and visual art are not separate. Movement becomes image; image absorbs lived experience. The question at the centre of my work: what does the body know that language cannot say?