Lines_of_Reproduction-Atlavina

LINES OF REPRODUCTION

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Véronique
Chance, Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in MA
Printmaking, for her endless support, knowledge,
creative, kind, understanding spirit and advice. She
continually inspired me and fostered my interest.
I would also like to thank Jane Boyer for encouraging
me to be sincere in all my findings, helping to take my
thinking to the next level.
I am thankful to Ms Iyemere and Ms Telford, who
supported me during the voluntering period, for giving
the right advice at the right time and for being a source
of motivation.
I would like to thank my friends, Elizabeth and Elena
Peeva for their faith in me and their endless support.
I would like to thank my parents and family for their
unconditioned love and professional support, especially,
Ivan, Alexandra, Ludmila, Anna and Anastasia.

LINES OF REPRODUCTION
Svetlana Atlavina
“The painter’s creative gesture does not originate in decision or will, but
concludes an internal stroke, a trajectory that also participates in regression.
But conrary to regression, it creates - as by a backward movement, like a
reversal of the course of psychological time - a stimulus to which the gesture
becomes a reaction.”
Brachia Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, p.49.
2018 - 2020

LINES OF REPRODUCTION
The project ‘Lines of Reproduction’ is dedicated to the role of women in society. The
body of work reflects an ongoing personal development through painful self-realisation
as a woman. My main challenge was to find a visual connection between myself being
a child, a teenager, a wife, a mother, and later a female artist.
During the initial stage of the project I experienced tremendous change in my conceptual
practice through new understandings of feminism, social care and art. It was activated by
volunteering for art workshops at a Mental Health Hospital and later at a Rehabilitation
and Support Centre for Women after incarceration.
There, for eight months, I worked alongside female nurses, female art-therapists,
caretakers, patients and women after difficult times. Then, naturally, the work progressed
towards an investigation of women’s role in society, motherhood, breastfeeding, and
fidelity.
Hours of work with vulnerable people continued with days of work in the ceramic and
printmaking studios. While I work I imagine the floating veil of matter which connects to
all reproduction processes, goes around bodily curves, senses attraction between sexes,
bonds females and babies during nurturing, and imagine my mother.
Once, when working on a throwing wheel, I felt with all my senses, the words of Louise
Bourgeois: ‘It is not an image I am seeking. It is not an idea. It is an emotion you want to
recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving, and of destroying’.
4

Then I started experiments in finding correlations between organic shapes produced in
printmaking and fluid 3D forms in ceramics. Discussing results on a regular basis with
my colleagues, friends, viewers of interim shows, I found that there are conscious and
unconscious connections, communicable and incommunicable feelings from childhood,
teenage and elder years, motherhood, marriages.
That gestural inscription of my hand over the clay edges and folds, later, during the
exhibition evoked in the viewers various emotions including: motherhood, desire,
hunger, jealousy, numbness and fidelity. People were perceiving and replying to the
unconscious connections, sometimes beyond descriptions.
Here, the words of Julia Kristeva resonate about the subject (viewer), who ‘is split
between the conscious and the unconscious, reason, and desire, the rational and the
irrational, the social and the pre-social…’
The Theory of Matrixial Borderspace, explained by Professor Bracha Ettinger, opened
the direction of the research into psychoanalytical and philosophical literature. It also
provoked investigations into my behavioural patterns and traumatic issues, influencing
the admittance of never healed wounds acquired during childhood and marriage.
My art works are connected to the inexpressible part of the visual art language. On
the other hand, they reflect the pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic stage of the development
of each human, when symbols, stamps and words are to be learned, the visual field is
limited to family members and ongoing communication is through emotions and facial
expressions.
5

6
Helen

Mila
7

8
Maria

Dora
9

10
Ekatherina

Bracha
11

12
Lucrecia

Nina I
13

14
Louise

Svetlana
15

16
Jane

Sarah
17

18
Nona

Valentina
19

20
Valeria

Mother Board
21

22
Jozefine

Demetra
23

24
Seraphima

Lubov
25

26
Griselda

Natasha
27

28
Barbara

Melanie
29

30
Lee

Xsenia
31

32
Diana

Veronique
33

34
Eleonor

Victoria
35

36
Marina

Christina
37

38
June

Mama
39

40
Joanna

Sylvia
41

42
Zoya

Clarimont
43

44
Elena

Athena
45

46
Deborah

Anna-Jouissance
47

48
Alla

Alex
49

50
Monserat

Matrena
51

52
Regina

Olga
53

54
Unona

Alexandra
55

56
Susan

Anastasia
57

58
Lana

Elizabeth
59

60
Viviann

Rosa
61

62
Tatyana

Jaquiline
63

64
Laura

65

Catalogue design
Svetlana Atlavina
Proofreader and Editor
Sally Stenton
Front cover image
“Lines of Reproductions”, 2019
Unglazed ceramics
Image by Andrzej Zofka
Contact details
svetlana.atlavina@gmail.com
www.svetlanaatlavina.com
All images in the catalogue
© Svetlana Atlavina 2019
All rights reserved