Via Melbourne, Australia via the Soviet Union, DIY savant Stanislava Pinchuk – or Miso, as she artistically authorizes – creates and shares beautiful hand-mades. She creates without dimensional limitations, sketching, designing, tattooing and publishing. With clients comprised of close friends and known conglomerates, the limitations of her hand-made work is wholly hers.
With a minimalistic approach Miso carves out a bulk of her work with faint, delicate holes, individually aligned to create images and designs much more complex than the tiny details they start off as. Punctured paper transforms into full stories for Miso, continuous memories of pain, beauty and intimacy. Similar in style are her punctured-skin designs, her mini installations to those she shares with. Through a five-year stint with stick-and-poke tattooing her technique is transparent, adding passion, power and an artistic connection untouched by the close of galleries and exhibitions.
What was your first DIY experience/project and how did it fuel your future endeavors?
It’s a little hard to say. I guess it’s something that’s always been around. I grew up in the Soviet Union, in a Soviet block on the very outer ring of the city. At the tail end of the USSR and in the years after its collapse there wasn’t much around – especially where we were. So, making things ourselves was very important, and I really do have strong memories of that.
My mother made clothes quite often, and we always made toys, things for the house – lots of things are traded. I think that might be the root of it.
You seem to play with several different mediums. Is there an overarching theme or inspiration between the different artistic mediums?
I think there are definitely strands of thought that carry across my practice; the relation of mapping to memory, recording cities and urban environments, and the tension between physical pain and beauty, which is a big part of my gallery works, and also my tattooing. But there are always a billion loose thoughts too.
Where do you find your inspirations? Do different projects inspire one another for you?
Yes, absolutely! Because I’m lucky to work across quite a few practices, little things might carry across; either out of inspiration, and wanting to take an idea further or from realizing the limits of a medium, and wanting to carry it over into another project.
Tell us a little bit about your creative processes and how that has expanded over the years.
I’m not quite sure, and I feel like I have a really, really long way to go still.
A big part of it, I think, is that I never want to art school. I still think it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made, but as a result, I do feel like I’m always playing catch-up, feeling like I never had the opportunity to play with different mediums and facilities.
When did tattooing come into your life and what does the special communication of tattooing (as we see in your book!) mean to you?
I began tattooing about 5 years ago, but very quietly. Just something for friends – I didn’t document it or speak about it for a very long time. I knew it would come into my art practice somehow if I followed my feet with it, but didn’t know quite how. I still feel like it’s not quite there, but hopefully it’s on the way. I think it clicked when I began making the pin-works, almost the same technique and the same tangents: the tension between physical pain, beauty, decorativity and memory. But I like that one is very intimate, and the other is quite formal – one is carried with you forever, and the other is displayed, in collections, museums or in storage.
For more about Stanislava and her most recent work visit m-i-s-o.com
