A Fluvial Rhythm

 ‘All this water surrounding the space seems to hold it, suspended, floating as if in an amniotic sac, a cocooning and buoyant atmosphere conjured by paint.’

The works, meanwhile, are painted on unprimed linen, a new method for the artist; some look as though they are spilling across the surface, over each other, extending softly out, towards the viewer. A passerby comes in from the rain and props their umbrella next to the door. A trickle of rainwater glides across the floor.

The title of Yukhnovich’s exhibition is Egg, and stepping into the space, it is as if you’re immersed in one; the walls close in around you, in a mostly comforting way. The image of an egg is interesting to start with: both banal and ordinary, but also a charged, ancient theological symbol of the unfathomable mystery of new life, representative across cultures of the origin of the universe. Golden according to Hindus, silver for the Orphics, red for Catholics – and in many of these creation stories, the cosmic egg is activated by primordial waters, the shell splitting into earth and sky.

‘Towering above, lurking behind the paintings, it suggests a dense moss-like environment, larger than the viewer and growing around the gallery of its own accord.’

The common vernacular describes an artist’s production as a ‘body’ of work – a cohesive entity that evolves and grows, a singular organism with a life of its own that appears almost mysteriously, even to its progenitor, the womb-like incubator of the studio. Yukhnovich finds parallels between this painterly process of bringing something into being and the experience of pregnancy she was living through while making the paintings that hang here in Venice. Both creative processes produce something ardently felt but invisible. I have experienced three pregnancies and I can attest to their strangeness – the sense of detaching from one’s own body from within, organs being squeezed, skin stretched and swelling, taken over from inside. I recall Maggie Nelson’s words, pregnancy as a ‘radical intimacy with – and radical alienation from – one’s body.’

‘I sense in the flurry of fragmented flesh-coloured marks in paintings like llmatar and Groweth Seeds and Bloweth Mead, the internal jostling for space.’

I sense in the flurry of fragmented flesh-coloured marks in paintings like llmatar and Groweth Seeds and Bloweth Mead, the internal jostling for space. There’s a different kind of physicality to these works, less muscular than her previous, larger-scale paintings, perhaps also the result of a changing physical interaction with the canvas and handling of the paint, as a pregnant person. But these paintings are not directly personal responses to Yukhnovich’s physical experiences – as she tried to understand what was happening to her body in a wider cultural context, she returned to reading fables, myths and fairy tales many of us grow up hearing; oblique and surreal representations of conception, pregnancy and birth that translate the surreal emotional atmosphere but are often absent of the physical body. Take Thumbelina, Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 story about grief and loss, a thumb-sized girl born from a magical flower to a woman desperate for a child. Thumbelina is kidnapped by various malevolent creatures before she eventually finds peace in a warmer environment among flower angels.

In each painting, different creation myths intertwine and linger. llmatar nods to the virgin goddess from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, impregnated by the sea and wind. A baby’s face hovers at the top of the painting looking down on the composition, like the divine cherubs in the Renaissance and Baroque tradition, who signal a scene of divine intervention. Full Fathom Five, meanwhile, recalls the well-known words from Ariel’s deceptive song in The Tempest, which convince Ferdinand of his father’s death by drowning in a shipwreck. His body is transformed underwater – a ‘sea change’ that turns his bones to coral and his eyes to pearls. A sea change, a profound shift in direction, towards something beautiful.

‘In each painting, different creation myths intertwine and linger.’

‘The feeling of carrying something alive and animated within you is both awesome and terrifying; but these paintings convey a gentle, transcendental joy, even ecstatic at moments, light with puffs and wisps and tendrils.’

‘The body of Egg paintings – a family of interconnected beings – are about looking from above and outside at an extraordinarily ordinary human experience.’