SURFERS OF THE UNIVERSE

Selena Sashina, Ukraine

Selena Sashina (Elena Podust) is a Ukrainian contemporary artist whose works are held in private collections in the USA, France, Belgium, Japan, and Ukraine. She began drawing in early childhood and received an academic education in the field of art culture. Since 2011, artistic practice has become her primary profession and the central focus of her creative life. Her artistic path began with impressionistic painting and later expanded into experiments with abstract surrealism and neurographic techniques. Through these practices, she explored perception, inner states, and the language of the subconscious. Over time, this research naturally evolved into a more symbolic and mythologically grounded visual language, where emotional states, intuitive structures, and archetypal imagery converge. Her work is rooted in surreal and symbolic thinking and is characterized by a multilayered visual language and a dense concentration of meaningful details. These elements invite prolonged contemplation and lead the viewer into a meditative, introspective state, where personal associations and inner projections become part of the artwork itself. In her current body of work, Selena explores mythological and ritual imagery through the figure of woman as a central axis of meaning. Female presence appears not as an object of desire, but as a bearer of memory, transformation, and sacred tension. Mythological beings, archetypal symbols, and ethnically inspired forms emerge around this figure as expressions of subconscious and collective memory rather than narrative illustration. Sensuality in her works exists as a state rather than an action — a pause before movement, a moment of initiation, a silent threshold between inner and outer worlds. Working across digital media, watercolor, and mixed techniques, the artist treats material as a language rather than a limitation, allowing the same conceptual core to unfold through different visual forms. Selena Sashina’s artistic practice invites the viewer not only to observe, but to enter a space of quiet concentration, where myth, body, and imagination merge into a contemplative experienc