Alexandra is a Russian artist based in Glasgow. Her work explores roots as the cornerstone of identity in a rapidly changing environment. Both drawing from memory and using cropped images, she sets the stage and choreographs its inhabitants, creating a precariously balanced pictorial world where figures cannot exist without space and space cannot exist without figures.  

Alexandra finds much of her inspiration in the old photo albums of her family. There is a conversation that takes place between the real subjects and something otherworldly, uncanny. She paints the past to bring the viewer into the present, to bridge the gap that explains the chaos that is now more evident than ever. She describes her works as nostalgic paintings that have a loving and familiar feel to them, seeing nostalgia as a process of representing history in the form of personal and collective memory. Being homesick for a home one never had. It’s a reflection about land, identity and family that one no longer belongs to or feels a distance from. A reflection about how to convey a sense of loss, displacement. Her work can be described as a collection of memories and spaces. Memories that are not hers and spaces that she has not visited.