Ekaterina Solomatina
Visual Artist
Ekaterina Solomatina is a Belfast-based fine artist, who works with a broad spectrum of mediums, including digital sculpture, AR, storytelling, sound design, puppetry and performative elements. The message of each project decides the right format whether it’s a digital cabbage field, flaming rolling pin performance, or Augmented Reality Monsters. The approach is always dialogue, research, striking aesthetics and épatage.
Ekaterina's art residency is with Flax Art Studios in Belfast. Last two years she has been co-directing Platform Arts (an artist-led studio group and contemporary art gallery based in Belfast’s city centre). Most recently Ekaterina had her first solo show 'Salad Curse' at PS2 Gallery which combined digital, physical sculpture, and sound. Artist's full CV is available below.
Mission
Ekaterina Solomatina's creative mission is best described with the Greek concept of 'Parrhesia'. Through her art Ekaterina explores 'forms of truth-telling' which require courage from both the speaker and the listener. Her aim is to create immanent dynamics where the listener or the viewer undergoes transformation at the point of connection with the visual art.
[Parrhesia] - in classical rhetoric is free, frank, and fearless speech. In ancient Greek thought, speaking with parrhesia meant "saying everything" or "speaking one's mind."
Vision
Ekaterina Solomatina invites her audience to partake in an empirical experiment of processing art, history, and reality as a whole, suggesting the viewer to rediscover cultural coordinates established in the past, same time as allowing the mind to wander off and look for the new reference points and anchors. This state of an intuitive, present, vivid creative mind is what Ekaterina is striving to work with.
