Soulful art made to find a home in hearts and on walls
Olesia Shelkovenko is an artist and photographer, originally from Kaluga, Russia. She graduated from art school and from a college of culture with a specialisation in design, and studied industrial design at Tula State University.
For a time Olesia lived and worked in Saint Petersburg. Today she lives in Porto, Portugal, where she continues to develop her creative practice.
At the heart of her work are the themes of nature, the inner world, emotional memory, change and the feeling of home. Moving and living between different cities and countries has become an important part of her artistic experience, shaping how she perceives space, belonging and personal identity.
Birds, butterflies, flowers and other natural forms appear often in Olesia's paintings. Through them she explores opposites and connections: day and night, light and darkness, fragility and resilience, the outer and the inner.
The theme of home holds a special place in her work — not only as a physical space, but as an inner state, a memory and a sense of belonging. She is also interested in how words, thoughts and emotional states affect a person.
Olesia works with colour, light, form and symbolic imagery, building a visual language through which she speaks about personal experience, change, nature and inner searching.
