ARTIST STATEMENT

My artistic practice explores what could be described as an archaeology of the psychic present. I am interested in the processes through which inner human states and collective consciousness emerge into visual form, as well as in the possibility of reclaiming identity within the pressure of social expectations, roles, and collective systems.

I work with the idea that mythological signs, dream imagery, and abstract structures do not belong exclusively to the past. They continue to function as a universal language through which the psyche expresses itself in the present moment. In this sense, ancient ornaments, modernist abstraction, and contemporary psychological experiences exist within one continuous field.

My works capture the moment this language begins to appear: the transition from the unconscious into visibility. Dreams, bodily impulses, and visual signs are approached as manifestations of the same process, in which internal material rises from beneath the surface and takes form.

The methodological foundation of my practice is process-oriented psychology, which allows me to approach states as unfolding processes rather than fixed images. This shifts the focus away from interpretation and toward observing the moment of becoming itself, where identity is experienced not as a stable construction but as a living and changing process.

Visually, this appears through biomorphic forms and recurring figures such as deer, birds, boats, fragmented bodies, and organic structures that function not as symbols with predetermined meanings, but as states of being. They exist simultaneously as personal experience, archetypal structure, and fragments of a collective visual language.

Color functions as a carrier of psychological state. Turquoise becomes a transitional zone, a space between bodily sensation, dream, and image, where a person can temporarily step outside imposed forms and reconnect with a sense of their own presence.

In this way, my practice approaches the image as a trace of process, a fragment of psychic reality extracted at the moment of its formation. For me, art is not a way of explaining identity, but a way of allowing it to emerge again: unfinished, vulnerable, and alive.

BIO

Aliya Kovalenko is a contemporary mixed-media artist whose practice explores identity, psychic archeology, and the tension between imposed social structures and inner integrity. Working across painting and sculpture, she creates biomorphic visual systems that exist between mythology, memory, dreams, and emotional experience. Her work investigates the process of returning to the self beneath inherited roles, expectations, and collective narratives.