The Blooming Soul
The Blooming Soul: An Artistic Act Through the Lens of Botanical Metaphors
From March 12 to 17, 2025, the Eight Squared Gallery in Folkestone hosted the art exhibition "The Blooming Soul: A Celebration of Spring and Nature’s Awakening." This exhibition brought together eight outstanding international artists, each creating their works in various mediums ranging from abstract and figurative art to interactive installations.
The group of artists—Igor Khlopotov, Irina Slepko (Gauk), Iryna Yauseyenka, Mariia Babina, Natalia Titova, Svetlana Sycheva, Victoria Dini, and Yulia Rotkina—explored the interpenetration of artistic methods of understanding reality and various botanical concepts, techniques, methods, and established expressions. This interplay between the artist's symbolic field and the semiotic field of the gardener (botanist, florist, forester, naturalist, etc.) is a key conceptual finding of the exhibition, seemingly aimed at overcoming the fundamental boundaries between spheres of human activity and perception in pursuit of a hypothetical sense of wholeness, interconnectedness, and inseparability.
This exhibition is not merely a statement within the frameworks of unreflected eco-positivism that accompanies us from supermarket to trash bin; it is a bold and successful assertion by young outstanding artists striving for a deeper level of reflection that complements social anxiety with rhetorical intuitions, activist slogans with a metaphysical superstructure, and humanity's longing for nature with a bitter existential poetic humility.
The wide palette of artistic means and techniques, vivid images, and sumptuous colours—depicting themes of germination, the birth of life, the sprouting of seeds, swelling buds, sticky leaves, budding, and vegetative reproduction—poses a complex challenge of creating a non-trivial lexicon of new, previously non-existent symbolic connections that precede future neural ones. This allows us, for example, to transcend superficial sexuality in the imagery of the pistil and stamen and perceive in them a mystical or even religious yearning.
Each of the eight participants in the exhibition developed their paradoxical artistic strategy, revealing and enriching the aforementioned theme. In this article, we would like to focus in more detail on the works of two participants.
Within the exhibition 'The Blooming Soul,' the digital collage works of artist Natalia Titova stand out distinctly. Unlike the other participants, she uses direct visual botanical metaphors less prominently; however, it is this visual elusiveness that renders her works resonant, piercing, and aesthetically sharpened to the maximum. The artist simultaneously constructs and deconstructs, manifests and mythologises, and creates and destroys. Her collage series titled "Tove" serves as a captivating visualisation of the modern artist's thought process as they grapple with themes of life, nature, memory, cultural interactions, and the dissolution of perception boundaries regarding various substances. For instance, in her works, a wired earphone may represent both a sperm cell and a rope for tying, as well as the contour of an unidentified object. A golf club can be interpreted as a grass-cutting scythe, a contour of a fractal universe, and a blade severing a character's legs from the solid ground beneath them.
The subtly botanical metaphorical nature of her works levels all objects of memory against one another, literally endowing each object with the properties of the plant world. A cloud can become the earth from which identical bodies or body parts grow, while air can transform into the ground from which clouds arise. The objects simultaneously serve as items from the real world (coloured) and artefacts of memory, documents of the past (black and white). A dress becomes the sea, an earphone turns into the moon, and suddenly, the late British queen and a naïve monocle appear. Nevertheless, at the top of Natalia Titova's collages, flowers are always positioned, adding a hint of sorrowful hierarchy to her dynamic pluralistic rhizomatic artistic world— "Flowers above all."
The most striking aspect of these digital works is the sensation of lightness and imaginative freedom, albeit this lightness is produced by an inquisitive and critically self-reflective artist. Upon closer inspection, one can recognise the immense labour and meticulous development invested in these works, which imbue the collage compositions with the potential to resemble a Hindu abode of demigods (loka).
"On The Road" by Yulia Rotkina is an intricately organised piece of artwork. Upon encountering it, we may succumb to the charm of traditional mediums (canvas, oil), the cosy minimalism of the composition, and the soothing thickness of the brushstrokes; however, this should not obscure from us a whole range of the artist’s identities, which are masterfully concealed in the painting (like seeds in the ground) and reveal themselves, harbouring immense perceptual possibilities. It is this balance of the hidden and the manifest that structures or organises the complex attraction of engaging with the painting's message.
Firstly, one of the artist's identities is that of a critic of binary oppositions. All paired phenomena in this work undergo a process of critical reflection. It is particularly peculiar that the composition reads as a triptych: earth, sky, and the figure of a person. When we attempt to analyse the various elements of the painting in pairs, we find that there are no explicit pairs present. The artist transcends binary thinking through the active use of non-obvious trinaries. In the pair "human and nature," she adds another layer of nature. In the pair "blue and green," she introduces an ambivalent object that can be both blue and green, depending on the perspective.
Another identity of the artist is that of a synaesthetic experimenter. The minimalism of expressive means in Rotkina's work is complemented by a maximalism of perceptual approaches. For instance, the deliberate relief indicates a dynamic and emotional dimension, while the use of a limited palette of complex cool colours sets the tone for the blurring of boundaries and an asserted homogeneity of things. The third identity of the artist is that of a post-storyteller who has abandoned key elements of storytelling but preserved the essence of her narrative message through the vast possibilities of direct silence. Where she remains silent, kaleidoscopes of our viewer interpretation emerge. This work inspires and amazes with its complexity of conceptual development and unparalleled technical execution.
