Ekaterina Sycheva

Year of birth: 1994.
Your education: Bachelor of Design, motion design course, 3D modeling course.
Describe your art in three words: Colorful, excessive, nostalgic.
Your discipline: Graphic design.
Website | Instagram

Can you share more about your artistic journey, from your beginnings in a small industrial town to becoming a multidisciplinary designer?

The directions of my artistic path have undoubtedly been influenced by my professional work. I’ve always enjoyed learning additional skills. Each workplace allowed me to gain experience working with different materials and to try myself in various fields of design. My first job was at a small printing house located in a remote industrial area of Chelyabinsk. The value of this experience lies in the close acquaintance with various printing techniques and material processing methods. I could observe and control how everything I imagined materialized. After moving to Saint Petersburg, I got involved in event design. This period marked the beginning of my exploration of motion design and animation. Currently, my work involves developing branding and communication design for an IT company. This activity requires the skill of creating 3D graphics. Thus, I have gained experience in creating visuals in many different ways, but collage technique has always been my favorite.

Ekaterina Sycheva | Cyberpunk in Russia | 2018

How do the environments of industrial towns and residential districts influence your work, particularly your fascination with depicting decay and abandonment?

I see a certain romance in the ordinary course of life. Neglected houses, and districts express through their appearance a memory of the past. Abandoned places look mysterious, inviting you to uncover their secrets. In my works, I show how time can “stop” in such locations. I am interested in expressing this through the contrast of decay with the rapid development of the surrounding world. If I depict a specific place, I include interesting facts from history in the work — revealing its secrets.

Your work often incorporates visual metaphors. What is your process for developing these metaphors, and how do they connect to your themes of social issues and emotional dramas?

To create a visual, I first need to formulate my idea in text. I like to play with words when searching for metaphors, turning the figurative meaning of words into the literal and vice versa. This process generates visual images in my mind. I may look for aphorisms, proverbs, quotes, historical references, and statistical data on the chosen topic. Often, I draw analogies between things/phenomena from completely different areas of life. The greater the differences, the more interesting it is to talk about the points of contact. This approach allows me to vividly express various social issues and convey my feelings through visual examples.

Ekaterina Sycheva | Snowy evening | 2023

How do you approach the integration of typography and hand-drawn elements into your digital collages?

Typography is an integral part of poster art, and in collages, it looks just as organic. Since my ideas often start with text, in the finished works, the graphic forms of words and visuals resonate and reveal each other’s meaning. Hand-drawing elements in collages add an element of surprise to the result of the creative process. This technique turns photo fragments into the main source of inspiration, into the starting point for organizing the space and structure of the visual work. The objects drawn on top of the collage become accents, connecting elements for the overall meaning of the work.

You participated in significant exhibitions like the 2021 ‘My Page’ exhibition at the Erarta Museum and the Uruguay Cartel Biennial in 2023. How have these opportunities shaped your artistic practice?

Large projects, especially international ones, have a positive impact on motivation and inspiration. I like to think that my works start to “live their own lives.” They “meet” people, travel to other countries, which I have not yet had the opportunity to visit. I am also interested in learning about the creative paths of colleagues with whom I exhibit in the same project and apparently share a common wavelength. Exhibitions are not only about attracting attention to something beautiful or problematic. They are an opportunity to discover inspiring contemporaries and become part of the design community. In my work, I have begun to study both modern visual trends and historical graphic styles more deeply.

Ekaterina Sycheva | Yard | 2023

What message do you hope to convey through your work addressing social issues and mental struggles?

In everyday life, we get caught up in routines that prevent us from being aware of many things; we do everything automatically. I would like to show things from a different angle, things that perhaps no one pays attention to. I want to talk not only about problems but also to show beauty and curiosities where they are hard to notice. My works are imbued with melancholy but at the same time with a sense of attachment, a sense of kinship with the place. We do not choose where to be born and whom to love. We only decide what to do with our feelings next. While advocating for fighting certain problems, I would not want people to get stuck in negativity and stop seeing the beauty in the world around them. Life consists of contradictions, and we need to learn how to exist in this paradigm.

You are now part of the Intercontinental Biennial with a poster on ‘Andy Warhol.’ How did Warhol’s influence inspire your creative process for this project?

I imitated the pop art style in color and the character of the graphics. The texture of the cans is used as a reference to Andy Warhol’s works. The creation of the main visual metaphor was inspired by Andy Warhol’s quote, “As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it.” The central objects of the collage are hands. Each of us has lines on our palms, and some people believe that these lines chart our destiny. Therefore, the collage depicts lines in the form of a path from the starting point to the point of achieving the goal.

Ekaterina Sycheva | Andy Warhol