Maria Saukhina

My artistic practice explores the body as a carrier of experience, investigating how psychological states can become visible through movement, material and image.

Working across performance, moving image, photography and painting, I examine the relationships between support and constraint, dependence and resistance, control and its loss. I am particularly interested in moments of instability, when familiar structures begin to shift and the body must negotiate new conditions.

My background in visual arts, psychology and aerial performance informs an interdisciplinary approach in which the body becomes both an instrument and a material presence. Suspended fabrics, gravity, physical tension and repetitive movement create conditions through which vulnerability and transformation can be explored.

In my project Becoming Image (2026), performance becomes a process of image-making. Movement is translated into photographic traces, video, painted surfaces and material interventions. Fabric may function as support, restraint or an extension of the body, while the resulting images preserve evidence of tension, displacement and change.

I am interested in what remains after an action has ended: an imprint, a mark, a displaced material, or an image that no longer requires the body's presence. Across different media, I investigate how physical processes can give form to experiences that resist verbal description.

My practice has developed through different disciplines and cultural contexts. I originally trained in visual arts and later studied psychology, completing an MSc at the University of Stirling.

My experience in aerial movement and performance has shaped my understanding of the body as a means of expression and investigation. Moving between visual art, physical practice and psychological enquiry has encouraged me to explore experiences that are difficult to articulate through language alone.

Having developed my early artistic practice in Kaliningrad and subsequently continued working in London, I bring together different environments, materials and approaches to making. These experiences inform my interest in vulnerability, adaptation, dependence and the changing relationship between the body and its surroundings.