DEFLORATION* OR TENDENCIES OF INNER POETRY is a series of small-scale watercolour drawings exploring recurring memories shaped by war and displacement. Distorted corporeal forms in neon pink and bloody red form a non-linear affective narrative of fragmented memories and coded secrets.   

Following my return to Belarus from Russia in 2022, the series emerged in response to a rupture in both my personal experience and artistic language. Previously mostly figurative, my work shifted towards abstraction, revealing loss and absence of language. Recurring, fragmented memories disrupted the coherence of personal narrative, engendering fragmented and repetitive imagery. Immersing myself in the work while experiencing flashbacks, I captured intimate fragments of past experience, codifying them into allusive gestures.  Starting from a drop, I chained one drop with another, re-living and destroying the gesture with overlaps of black. Balancing affect and control, I immersed myself in re-feeling and emerged leaving a repetitive mark. Echoing the rupture between past and present, between memories and presence, the series retrospectively arranges detached fragments into a coherent affective sequence, moving from a dissociated mind towards bodily presence. 

*Defloration — 1) The act of depriving a woman of her virginity; 2) An act that despoils the innocence or beauty of something.