Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Natalya Khorover. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Natalya, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
That would be the current project which I just finished. Though I can’t really call it finished, part one perhaps?
I am an artist who works in repurposed media, and by repurposed, I mean materials which have no other use and will wind up in the landfill. I collage and stitch by hand and machine, anything that will succumb to these techniques. Mostly it’s soft single-use plastic packaging.
But this project is one step removed. I walk my dog almost daily in a suburban forest surrounded by major roads. Since I have started walking here when I moved to the neighborhood in summer of 2022, I have started picking up trash as I was walking. For reasons unknown to me at the time, I started cleaning (lightly), organizing and cataloguing this trash. As time went on and my collection started outgrowing my tiny studio as I started thinking more and more about what I was finding, I understood what I needed to do with this collection.
We humans are excellent at leaving behind traces of our activities. Even a simple walk in the park seems to result in evidence on the trail. These are the crumbs, left inadvertently or purposefully, which are marking our existence, and contributing to pollution.
We humans are also excellent at working towards solutions by following the crumbs. A tiny little easy solution is plalking (picking up litter while walking). That’s something you can do right away.
I realized that I needed to make the invisible visible. It seemed like I was the only one noticing and picking up these crumbs. So I cast the crumbs in resin, which transforms and elevates the trash into something beautiful. The way the resin makes glass shards and plastic wrappers become translucent and glow is quite remarkable.
There is an abandoned shack on one of the paths I walk. I made it into a secret gallery and created an installation from the trash that I have picked up over a year of walking these paths. Only observant people will notice this shack may have something inside it. I hope that when they do notice, they may see the beauty of the glistening fragments and upon a closer look will realize that they are looking at trash.
And of course now I want to repeat this experiment in as many urban or suburban forests as I can. And perhaps rural ones as well.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I create art for earth’s sake and I am inspired by plastic pollution, overconsumption and the urban environment. I strive to use materials which would be condemned to the landfill and choose to use the unusual techniques of stitching and sewing to bring my artwork to life.
Reclaiming and repurposing materials to use in my practice has been the rule for nearly 20 years. I meditatively hand stitch and mend vintage linens, and use my industrial sewing machine to collage and stitch layers of translucent single-use plastics which would otherwise contribute to litter pollution. The transformation through stitching makes these materials unrecognizable.
The New Geologic Epoch is the Anthropocene. Humans have added plastic to the mix of trash that they have already contributed. One of the worst offenders is single-use plastic which only causes more problems as it breaks down into smaller and smaller particles.
I hope to inspire more artists to use the materials that I use in practice, and with that become more knowledgeable about the plastic pollution crisis. But more importantly I want to make sure that everyone knows, that even if the can only do some tiny bit to keep or planet cleaner, that tiny bit counts in a big way.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect is to be able to make something every day. And to have a chance to inspire someone everyday as well.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
That mission is to make this planet better for our children and their children. The climate emergency that we are living through now can be helped if everyone contributes.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.artbynatalya.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artbynatalya/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NatalyaKhoroverArtist
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ0ZWXG0nIeMLXfOgau360Q
Image Credits
Photos by Ana Szilagyi