In an interview from Mission’s fifth issue, Hualice opens up about their unique approach to art, which they call, Huarealism.
It’s been said that an artist’s environment contributes just as much to their practice as the artist’s own abilities; often drawing upon influences from their locale, creatives tend to embody their surroundings. Instead of an enviable loft in SoHo or an 18th-century baroque salon in Paris, the story of surrealist textile artist Alice Hualice (née Alisa Gorshenina) takes us 300 miles north of the Kazakhstan border, to western Russia’s Nizhny Tagil.
Nestled in the Ural Mountains along the Tagil river, Nizhny Tagil is an industrial city of approximately 360,000 residents (small by Russian standards), and the home of Hualice. The artist’s Russian roots are integral to her very being, ever since her childhood in her native Yakshina, a small (small by global standards) village nearly 1,100 miles away, where she first planted her artistic roots.
“I spent the first years of my life in the village, [and] there was only one swing set for entertainment, so the children had to entertain themselves as best as they could,” she tells me. There is a gentleness in the way she describes her story to me, the whole thing painting a dusty, rose-colored portrait of infancy. “My first memories of myself are always related to what I paint.”
Although she started by dabbling in illustration and painting (even planning to become an illustrator after her days studying at an art institute) she considers that a number of life changes allowed her to come into her own. “During my studies, I managed to create my own art group and leave it, I opened many exhibitions and created many art projects outside the institute,” she says. “I can say that I lived a double life—on the one hand I [was] a freelance artist, on the other a student who [needed] to go to classes and follow the curriculum. I think that, when I was drawing, at some point I wanted something more and I moved into volume, and after that I started doing different experiments. Now I can say that I am a multidisciplinary artist who works with a variety of materials and techniques, from painting and textile sculptures to digital photo collages and animation.”
Best described by the artist as “Самоискусствление [samoiskusstvlenie],” a self-coined expression meaning “art itself”, Hualice’s creations are literally, as she puts it, “art through [themselves].” Her work is its own animal, expressed through her own personal lexicon. “I think that personal terms are closer to me—for example, not surrealism, but Huarealism.”
The works she produces, oftentimes dealing with the human face, whether it be through dolls, masks, puppets, paintings or prints, are shrouded with a comforting dark mysticism. “I love using the human body or parts of it in my art. And it has always been that way. I don’t know where it comes from, to be honest. Perhaps I am trying to understand a person as a kind of abstract concept, or maybe I am trying to understand myself.”
Due to her sheer dynamism, it’s hard to nail down exactly what her artistic practice entails, although there is something that Hualice explicitly states that it’s not. As her art deals with perception of the human face, her works are often misconstrued as pieces of horror, which provokes chagrin in the artist. “I would like people to see not only strange, distorted faces in my works, but also that there is nothing bad behind these faces. My works do not want to scare anyone, but they are not kind either. They, like all people, contain many qualities and moods. It seems to me that the main mood inside my work is melancholy.”
There is, indeed, a melancholic quality not only to her individual textile creations, but the context in which she presents them. The artist’s Instagram page is a mini art gallery, housing photos and videos of her pieces in action, fitting a little too comfortably into their arid surroundings.
Her photo series, Russian Foreign, created in Yakshina, is the perfect example of this melancholic mysticism at work. “It was a very emotional event and it was as if I was paying some tribute to the place that gave birth to me,” she says. “This was very important to me.“ Photos of the artist herself show her smiling and standing in the presence of masks and dolls, telling stories of her childhood in old Yakshina. The hollow windows of abandoned houses become eye sockets for plush eyeballs, while masked faces hang in comfortingly desolate doorways, the artist intentionally goading the spectator’s pareidolia. Hualice’s fabricated world is humming with a slow, creeping life, and if you blink, you might miss it.
It’s exactly these types of surroundings that Hualice states as inspirations: “When I go to the forest or walk in the field, these places also give me a great impetus to action.” Nature and, of course, chronic stomach ailment. “No matter how strange it sounds, I am inspired by my chronic stomach disease. She has been with me since childhood—I spent a lot of time in hospitals, it influenced me greatly. This is a negative experience, but it is also inspiring.”
If it’s not already apparent, Hualice is an enigma of positivity, gently confident in what she creates, as well as where she comes from. “I live in the Ural Mountains, the border between Europe and Asia passes through them, and the people living here are the embodiment of this border, including myself.” Her stories are her own, motivated by dreams that stretch far beyond Nizhny Tagil and Yakshina and the great Russian expanses, all the while maintaining a touching reverence for her home. “I remain here, and I am not alone here. I dream a lot of things. I have so many ideas that I want to bring to life. I do not know if I will do something for the city, if I will open my gallery here, if I will develop local art, but I definitely do not want to leave. I’m very comfortable here.”
