Natalya Gudovich: Between the Eternal and the Material
In this conversation, artist Natalya Gudovich reflects on a practice shaped by metaphysical inquiry, symbolic systems, mythology, and the material presence of marble. Living and working in Carrara, she approaches art as a way of engaging with questions that exceed the immediate social or political moment: love, death, eternity, the imaginal world, and the relationship between inner experience and universal structures.
Artist practice moves between painting, sculpture, multimedia, and installation, combining archetypal imagery with contemporary technologies. Rather than treating marble as a purely historical medium, she understands it as part of a broader artistic language - one capable of entering into dialogue with video, projection, and digital forms.
What themes, concerns, or lines of inquiry are currently central to your artistic practice?
My artistic practice has always been a way of understanding the world, so from the very beginning I have been interested in the deepest and most complex themes, such as love, death, the materialization of ideas, the imaginal world, and others. All these themes can be characterized and united under the common denominator of “the eternal,” “that which remains”; I am not at all interested in current agendas or contemporary political or social movements. I believe that modern man, although he has made great strides in the development of technology and technical capabilities, has in many ways lost his connection with the world in a different, subjective direction. This is precisely what I work on.
How would you define your visual and artistic language at this stage of your practice? Which elements are most fundamental to it - materiality, form, gesture, concept, corporeality, or spatial relations?
Well, for me, language is an integral part of the idea, the code through which the viewer reads the main intention, the thought. For me this code has several levels. The first is symbolic. I use a language of archetypal symbols that are intuitively understandable both to representatives of Western culture and to Asian cultures, Arab cultures, and others. Even color, form, and texture have symbolic meaning, not to mention more complex figurative objects. I have studied various symbolic systems - Hermetic, Shinto, Christian, ancient, Buddhist - and in many ways they are similar. The second level is iconography. Objects form a certain scheme and interact. This is directing; here too there is its own language - of dialogue, pause, intonation. It is more like music. I feel it as music. The third is the level of synthesis. A good work of art can always be described by the formula 1+1=3. By laying a certain thesis, comparison, or juxtaposition as the foundation of the concept, I ultimately get something new, experimental, something that gives value.
How has marble become part of your artistic practice, and what qualities of the material continue to inform your approach to it?
I have been living in Carrara for 5 years now, and I moved to this place because of marble. The first time I visited here was in 2017, in the studio of my former professor Aidan Salakhova, and it was a magical encounter. Carrara is an unusual place; it is even more like a state of the soul than a place. And the marble here is alive. It is a material that gives you an extraordinary inner core, and not only because it is quite difficult to work with - the technique can be learned fairly quickly, and I had wonderful teachers, masters from the Cooperativa Scultori di Carrara studio. Rather, it is a matter of some strange dialogue - while you work the marble, it transmits its energy to you. I don’t know how to describe it in words at all.
Marble carries a particularly dense historical and cultural legacy within the context of Italian art, architecture, and sculpture. How has living and working in Italy transformed your relationship with this material?
In my case, rather, it was a logical continuation and development of my artistic language. When I worked in painting and graphics, the main protagonists of my works were ancient statues of gods and heroes. So when I started working with marble, I simply transferred the image from the plane into volume.
Do you perceive a tension between marble’s historical associations as a canonical or “classical” medium and your attempt to activate it within a contemporary artistic discourse? How do you negotiate this relationship in your work?
If we compare one medium with another, there can be no contradiction here - it is all the field of language. I simply express the ambivalence of meanings in different media, for example, I enclose a 3D video inside a marble form or make an interactive projection onto a sculpture, and this produces precisely that very effect of semantic synthesis. A contradiction may arise if you try to combine heterogeneous things, but even that is a question of breadth of thinking. It has always surprised me that Italian artists consider themselves “burdened” by the weight of Michelangelo’s and Bernini’s fame. What luck - to be in such a rich artistic environment from childhood! It is a competitive advantage, it is the best teachers!
To what extent has the Italian cultural environment - its architecture, urban fabric, museums, workshops, and artisanal traditions - shaped the development of your practice?
Carrara is an international city, and it always has been. The Etruscans discovered the deposits and learned to work the stone. During the Roman Empire, slaves and captives from different countries were sent here to extract marble; later, sculptors came here from all over the world. The famous Golden Road was built between Rome and Luni, the sun and the moon. Carrara is first and foremost an environment for creativity; it gives me freedom, energy, material, and resources. But it does not influence me in a creative sense. What to speak about, the artist must choose for himself. Carrara does not accept people who do not know what they are doing and where they are going; it can even be dangerous for them.
How would you describe your process of entering and positioning yourself within the Italian contemporary art scene? What aspects of this transition proved most challenging, and what structures, communities, or encounters were particularly supportive?
These things don’t interest me at all. But people like my art, and they invite me to take part in various projects, and that is how it builds into a certain career. I always choose people. Even if a project is emerging or low-key, I can agree to participate if I share the values of its team. And vice versa - recently I refused to collaborate with a big gallery because we turned out to have little in common in axiological terms.
Do you feel that relocation and your experience of living in Italy have shifted your artistic identity or the way you understand your own position as an artist?
Definitely not, because I wasn’t running away from problems - I simply took a step forward on the path to knowledge.
Are there particular artists, architectural sites, cultural landscapes, or visual traditions in Italy that have become important points of reference within your practice?
From the point of view of symbolic language, I learned a great deal from Patty Nicoli while studying the alchemical tradition. It can also be said that all the world’s masters who work with marble - and there are few of us - have a certain interconnection. Here I also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the multimedia department, and although it is difficult to define that department as a separate school, I noted many new techniques and effects for myself.
Looking ahead, how do you imagine your practice developing? Are there particular themes, media, methodologies, or formats that you are interested in exploring further?
Right now I am interested in developing metaphysical themes; in painting, I am working on a series in which children play with eternity. In sculpture, I plan to continue combining marble and media techniques, expressing various metaphysical states. In fact, all research and discourses have their own logic, and later they come together into a broader, if not deeper, system.
Mythological, religious, and classical imagery recurs throughout your work. Do you approach myth and archetype as forms of universal visual language that can still operate within contemporary culture, or as inherited structures that need to be critically reconfigured and reinterpreted?
I believe that the structure of the human personality as we know it after the Christian era and Freudian personality theory is somewhat schematized. I am closer to the model proposed by James Hillman - the polytheistic one. And it is not the same as ancient mythology, although it resonates with it in many ways. At the level of the microcosm, one can resolve many questions of universal scale if one finds the right balance of forces within one's own soul. This is precisely what I work on when creating works of art, and the images of mythology are both an inheritance and a critical reflection and typification that requires a purely subjective interpretation, both on the part of the artist and on the part of all humanity.
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