Oleksandra Martson
-
Interview by Mariia Kashchenko
-
Published in July 2025
-
You work across oil painting, mixed media, sculpture and even sound art. How do you decide which medium best suits a concept or idea?
As an artist and creative, I come from a background in figurative painting and portraiture, oil on canvas remains my foundational medium. But as the war began and the themes I worked with expanded, I felt the urgency to explore them in greater depth and that meant exploring other mediums. It was like moving from two-dimensional storytelling into three-dimensional embodiment. I began experimenting widely, some materials resonated, others failed. Sculpture allowed me to give physical form to ideas that painting alone couldn’t hold. Metal, for example, gives me the kind of graphic precision I strive for in my paintings. On the other hand, clay and ceramics feel like oil painting in being so tactile, expressive, instinctual. Every artist develops a personal vocabulary with materials. For me, medium is inseparable from message and each one unlocks a different psychological or emotional register of the idea.
Your practice is deeply rooted in the human body. How has your understanding of the body as a “container for inner experience” evolved over the span of your practice?
You can trace a slow disappearance of the body in my work from fully rendered figures in earlier paintings, often lying in beds during Kyiv’s night air raids, to recent works like Presence, where only braids remain visible under folded sheets. It’s a shift from exposure to concealment. Initially, I wanted to be loud, visible, to make a clear statement about the suffering in Ukraine. Over time, that shifted inward. I began to cover the bodies unconsciously, intuitively. Eventually I realised I was protecting some fragment of lived experience that couldn’t be shown or translated. Not all trauma can be mediated. Some of it must remain felt only. This tension between showing and withholding has become central to my language.
How do you approach balancing realism with graphic or minimalistic compositions in your visual language?
Balancing visual and conceptual opposites is the centre of my practice, and I believe art in general. I often extract realistic, figurative elements from real life and place them in sparce, stylised environments. This dislocation lets the figure avoid literal representation. They’re no longer portraits of a particular person but rather archetypes and forms for emotion, memory, fear. This relation between the specific and the symbolic is where meaning begins to unfold.
The Sleeping series began during a moment of intense instability in Kyiv. How did the experience of disrupted sleep shape your emotional and visual exploration of rest and vulnerability?
No one is prepared for war.
I had read about it, seen it in films, but when it enters your life, it reshapes everything. Strangely, sleep became a recurring subject in conversations with friends who lived through the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. They spoke about insomnia, exhaustion, the dilemma of going to bed knowing that night could bring death. People began choosing the familiarity of their own bed over the coldness of a bomb shelter. It was a deeply human decision: to choose the comfort and routine to shut away the danger from your consciousness.
When the bombing comes at night, the bed becomes the most likely place to die. That contradiction became central in the Sleeping series.
I experienced this contradiction myself during visits to Kyiv. There’s an obvious parallel between sleep and death with bodies lying peacefully, indistinguishable under white sheets. If you have never thought about it, come to the death mask room at the National Portrait gallery in London and take some time looking into the faces - you will leave a different person.
You describe the bed as both a place of safety and fragility. Can we explore the ways you navigate that dual symbolism in your paintings?
I don’t really perceive them as opposites. Safety is psychological, it’s a feeling we project onto familiar things: our sheets, our routines, the silence of the night. Fragility is more objective. It’s about the body’s mortality, the truth of our physical vulnerability.
In a war zone, those two states collapse. Most people who die in Ukraine away from the front line, die in their beds buried under the rubble of their homes in night time bombings. The soft and known bed becomes a site of fragility, the most intimate space can also be the most dangerous.
In your Contemporary Landscapes series, smoke becomes both a destructive and serene element. What first drew you to use smoke as a primary visual motif?
Last year I began looking at classical landscape painting. Once nature was depicted as a passive backdrop but it dramatically changed over time. Today, that’s no longer the case. What struck me was how the idyllic clouds of old masters have been replaced in our collective imagery by dust plumes, smoke and fire. These modern clouds born from violence can be just as visually beautiful, but they carry a different weight. They are symptoms of something broken. That catastrophic tension became central to this body of work.
You mention that your latest series captures a ‘dreamlike moment in time and space.’ Do you see your landscapes as literal reflections of current events, or more psychological and symbolic?
This series is a kind of zeitgeist, as it captures what’s in the air, both literally and emotionally. Yes, the events are real (explosions, smoke, destruction) but the way they settle in the mind is surreal. I’m not trying to document reality like a journalist. I’m responding to it as an artist. For example, I have references for each of my explosions but those are reshaped and artistically processed peaceful clouds I see on a sunny day, not visuals of actual explosions as many viewers suggest. My landscapes are meant for shared emotion, I want to let viewers have their space for reflection inside my works as well.
The juxtaposition of natural clouds and man-made smoke is a recurring theme. What does this contrast say about your view of humanity’s relationship with nature?
The ecological crisis is a vital theme in my practice. I believe we’ve been living through a “soft apocalypse” for quite some time now, it`s not a singular, explosive collapse, but a slow erosion. In last year’s Shortest History of Earth exhibition, I created a fictional museum imagining evolution without humanity, a future where we’re no longer the main character. I worked primarily with metal, suggesting permanence and fossilization. In my newer works, man-made smoke takes over the role of clouds which a visual metaphor for how deeply human activity has altered the natural world.
How do you navigate portraying violent or unsettling subject matter while maintaining an aesthetic of beauty and calm?
From the beginning of the full-scale war, I’ve been trying to hold these two realities: horror and beauty. I want the viewer to confront difficult themes of mortality, violence, fear, but I don’t want to shock them visually. I build paintings that are formally and compositionally serene. If you look closely you can read the questions within: What is safety? What is death? What are we hiding from?
Both of your series reflect on crises—personal, political, and environmental. Would you say your work aims to document, process, or transform these experiences for the viewer?
I want each viewer to decide for himself how much capacity to engage with personal political and environmental questions does he have right now. Many of the viewers just admire technique and composition and it’s also completely valid. For me, the role of art isn’t to deliver statements, it’s to pose questions.
We should not forget that artists make art for their own sake. Many of us artists would not function without this outlet. I’m happy when an interaction with the viewer and my art can happen on every level.
-
Oleksandra Martson is a Ukrainian artist living and working in London.
Mariia Kashchenko is the founder of The Art Unit, online curated platform selling works by emerging artists.
︎ @theartunit
-
If you like this why not read our interview with Lucien Anderson.
-
© YAC | Young Artists in Conversation ALL RIGHTS RESERVED