Larysa Bernhardt Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory member provides some fascinating insights into her practice and experience as a textile sculpture artist, as she responds to the questions below:
- Has creating art ever served as a form of emotional regulation or healing for you? How so?
- Do you work with recurring symbols, archetypes in your art? What do they represent for you?
- What role does imperfection play in your art, if any?
- How do you imagine the relationship between technology and creativity changing in the next 10 years?
Has creating art ever served as a form of emotional regulation or healing for you? How so?
Creating can be anything you want it to be. It can be healing – or disturbing, painful, like reopening old wounds. And it is both to me, and much more. I open my old wounds, and then reach for a thread and needle to stitch them back up again, fully knowing that i will be unpicking these same threads again later. Is this what healing process is? I don’t know. I am my own vulture; I attack parts of me that seem dead. Maybe it’s cyclical in nature, you know? just like everything else in life. You don’t need healing if you haven’t been hurt.
Do you work with recurring symbols, archetypes in your art? What do they represent for you?
Moths and butterflies, of course. Birds. Anything with wings. Anything in a sky. Anything with a heart. Simple symbols anyone can understand. Ancient language becoming modern hieroglyphics. Going through metamorphosis while staying the same. I think that’s what i am trying to say with my imagery – only outside changes, inside stays the same.
What role does imperfection play in your art, if any?
You become very humble working with velvet. It hides some stitches while emphasizing the other ones. I do preliminary sketches but never transfer them to fabric. I embroider freehand and it allows me to change the course if better idea comes up. Perfection is a cage you build for yourself. It’s an opposite of creative approach. If I had to constantly compare the picture in my mind to the work in front of me I wouldn’t be able to finish a single piece. Salvador Dali famously said “Do not be afraid of perfection, you will never reach it” – sums it up quite well.
How do you imagine the relationship between technology and creativity changing in the next 10 years?
For this question i had to find a definition of technology, sometimes it’s good to check if my understanding of things is still relevant. I found that word “technology” comes from Greek word τέχνη (tékhnē), that means ‘knowledge of how to make things’. The stone tool that smashes the nut was human’s first technology, and later came the wheel. The same stone tool can smash someone’s skull and wheel can be refashioned into a torture device. I know these are very primitive examples and i apologize.
I am just trying to say – it is all about HOW it used. How is it going to be used in ten years? Well, it depends on what kind of humans we are, isn’t it? We can choose to employ technology to explore and develop our original ideas. We can also choose it to generate ideas for us – but we cannot keep calling this “creativity”, because it isn’t.
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