There’s quite a lot of debate around whether creation is just a process of ‘recording’ ideas that you were made to ‘find’ – David Lynch describes coming up with ideas as “fishing”, whereas Eric Hu says a great big “fuck no” to the idea that art is, in any way, ‘discovered’ by its creator. Daria Chernyshova, an artist based in Berlin, puts it another way again. She describes her practice as a process of recording visions that are “synthesised” somewhere off screen in the brain and which appear to her in flashes, completely spontaneously.
Her job, then, is to create order where there is none. “Strict organisation is my attempt to cope with the ambivalence of irrational vivid emotions that I often experience,” Daria says. Most works begin on a small piece of paper; then Daria draws the “boundaries” in which she will work. Columns, tables, grids and graphs are laid out and then filled in neatly with rope or coloured lines. “It helps me concentrate,” she says.
But that’s not to say these aren’t real graphs. Daria catalogues data just as much as any science journal, she just records “nuances of feeling” and recollections – in other words, brain data. The idea of creating order where there is none seems to bring her work into the tradition of graphic design. But Daria simply pulls from everywhere, based on where intuition points her.
“By practising intuitive drawing, I am trying to turn off my inner critic and just go with the flow. Coloured shapes in my drawings become a shorthand of emotional vibe. I want to capture what excites me that day.”
