“Mental illness is not conducive to creativity”. Interview with artist Alisa Aistova

Alice, let’s start from the beginning. Your first degree was in computer science, and then you decided to become an artist. Please tell us how and why this happened.

My education is a veritable kaleidoscope. I’ve always been an artist, I’ve been passionate about drawing and character creation since childhood, I spent several years in a serious academic art school, from which I left a few months before receiving my diploma because I lost interest in painting landscapes and plaster heads. I wanted to create something of my own. But art school gave me a wonderful base. By the time I finished school I didn’t consider the profession of an artist as something serious and in addition I got interested in journalism, I entered the journalism department at RGSU, studied there for a year and left because it was hard for me to combine my studies and work on television. Later, I enrolled in Information Technology, but it was more a tribute to the need in Russia for everyone to have a higher education than something I was really interested in.

Around 2013, I stopped resisting my desire to pursue an artistic path and found the courage to end my successful career in IT headhunting and return to the field of art and design, only with serious intentions. The first impetus was the typography and font course I completed at the British School of Design, followed by Free Workshops at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and my first group exhibition at ArtPlay.

You studied at several top schools – in Moscow and in London. How much does the approach to teaching photography differ, and which school was particularly important to you and why?

It’s hard to compare, as I studied in Moscow at the best online school of contemporary photography “DocDocDoc”, but unfortunately I couldn’t finish the course because I got sick with depression. I am still considering the possibility of taking it again. This school, I think, is the most innovative and extensive thing that exists now in Russia in the field of teaching contemporary photography as an art.

I studied in the UK twice, both at Central Saint Martins – the first time was the Foundation Course in Art and Design, which involves a lot of different experimental practices, theoretical background, working with literature and increasing my level of observation. For example, amongst other things, each week we were given a list of books to read and galleries to visit, the pace was crazy! But I was absolutely delighted. You could say that this course ultimately shaped my current path as an artist working with photography.

For the second time, I returned to CSM for my MA and completed my MA in Contemporary Photography and Philosophical Practices. These two years were already more focused on immersing myself in the depth of the subject, I spent more time in the library and working on my dissertation NOTHING: Art created during clinical depression stage, which served as the basis for my book that I am working on now.

Most of your works are devoted to depression and difficult inner states, but at the same time they give off a feeling of silence and tenderness. Please tell us more about how you work with this complex subject, which is very personal on the one hand and familiar to many people on the other.

Unfortunately, choosing the subject I am focused on at the moment was not something I had the opportunity to give up. As an artist, I was faced with the hard fact that I had nothing but illness in my life for several years. I didn’t want to identify myself through a definition like, “I’m Alice, an artist, I’m 36 years old and clinically depressed,” but I found it interesting to explore the subject and the transformation of the artist’s inner state and creative process during this difficult period. Thus was born the project NOTHING: Art created during clinical depression stage and with it a book in which I analyze the impact of mental illnesses on an artist’s creative process.

I made a conscious decision not to make this topic personal, but to tell and engage as many people as possible who have been affected in one way or another.

You rarely photograph landscapes and almost never people. But the objects in your works seem alive and compassionate, and in the folds of the sheets you can still feel the warmth of the human body. Can you tell us where and how you find the images for your works?

My work during this period is mostly what I had the strength to capture with my phone camera, like translucent sketches. They lack everything we expect from photography – clarity, sharpness, depth of frame and beautiful resolution. Photographs are blurry, they are barely tangible, on the edge of dream and reality. A door to nowhere, taken while I was lying on drips in a psychoneurological dispensary, a jug of water in the ward, dirty dishes accumulated over many days from powerlessness, illness, and so on. It is important to me that my photos evoke feelings, emotions, even if they are disturbing or hard to feel, everyone will feel something different, but they will definitely feel.

Tell me about it., please., a little bit more о your book NOTHING: Art created throughout clinical depression stage. Why did you decide to work on a book and how will this format differ from a series of photographs?

This book is an inevitable step, more like my first creative monograph, in which I would like to rework all the material I have accumulated and combine my work, my analysis and my texts. I did a lot of research during my Master’s program at Saint Martins and now I want to put it all into a finished form, ideally with an exhibition, for which I am also slowly looking for a curator and space and dialoguing.