‘I am convinced that Cambridge would benefit so much if every College had an artist in residence.’

When the artist Yelena Popova spoke to Prerona Prasad about her art and influences.

Yelena Popova is a Nottingham-based artist of Russian origin. Trained at the Moscow Art Theatre School and the Royal College of Art, London, Popova’s practice is wide ranging, including painting, digital projections, and installations. Since her residency at Girton College (2016-17), Yelena Popova has also worked in the medium of tapestry. Her work, For Body, Soul and Spirit, is in the College’s art collection and is part of the exhibition WE ARE HERE at The Heong Gallery.

When the exhibition opened, everybody was talking about your tapestry For Body, Soul and Spirit. Where did the idea of creating tapestries come from? You’re not, primarily, a textile artist, are you?

In my paintings, I work with a medium that is so transparent that the surface is always present. You can see the weave of the canvas. I did a lot of research into canvases and painting supports – Irish linen, cotton canvas, different weaves … historically there are some weaves which have patterns on them under the paintings. I was doing that and thought, wouldn’t it be amazing to actually weave the image.

I started the work in 2016, when I had a project that involved a code-generated computer projection (This Certifies That). I was looking at bank notes, and the intricate woven lines called guilloche lines which are an anti-forgery measure. The idea of security comes from really tight woven images.

I had started using Adobe Illustrator™ and, from there, this idea of working with lines and making quite a precise linear pattern came to me. The tapestries are all made in jacquard, which is something we see every day in upholstery. This kind of fabric is woven from a digital file by a machine, but the mathematics behind it is really quite interesting. I live in Nottingham, which was a textile centre in the United Kingdom. My first studio was in a textile factory. The idea of textiles, the weaving machines, the history of the industry – I looked at all that as well.

A feature of woven textiles is that you have to make a lot of decisions over what goes over something else, and the layering. There are bits that are in relief and there are lines that disappear underneath. All of that, like in embroidery, is a choice. How did you go about making these choices?

When I started to play with the idea of making tapestries, I thought it shouldn’t just be a direct translation of the image. Working with digital images allows a complexity that would be quite impossible to do by hand. I aim for that complexity which is impossible to do by hand. The precision and layering, like in my paintings, is very important. Where forms interlock, it is almost mathematically calculated. This layered thinking and geometrical connection is present in tapestries, even though the shapes are simpler and the image is more symmetrical.  In tapestries, I started to rely more on symbolic images, or images of scientific diagrams, drawing from other people’s work. In paintings, I feel it is all the language I speak, but in tapestry, I feel freer to have wider sources of reference in terms of imagery.

Weavers traditionally come from long lineages, with every generation learning the craft from the previous one. It’s interesting to hear you say that the tapestries freed you up to actually tap into traditions.

I’m not sure if they freed me up or confined me. The woven image has to tell a story. The tapestry always tells a story and stories survive because they have been woven. Maria Warner once said that ‘text’ and ‘textile’ have the same root. I think it the same in Russian as well – in many languages. Unlike painting, a tapestry has to tell a story, even if it has an abstract image. Working with scientific imagery and diagrams really helps to do that. Every scientific drawing is the abstraction of an idea. I spent many hours looking for interesting diagrams and ideas.

The development of abstraction in the West coincided with scientific advancements. If we take Hilma af Klint and the study of electricity and magnetism, it’s all there in her drawings. I think abstraction and science is probably quite close.

When people think of things that are digital or machine-made, there is a sense that they are somehow easier to make, replicable, that they are not as imbued with human endeavour. When you say that your tapestries are only achievable through these technologies, do you think it makes you think about industrialisation and mechanisation in a slightly different way?

It’s always going to be a partnership. It has to a collaboration between human and machine – it can’t be anything else. It’s great when two ‘minds’ work together. In 2016, I was really quite interested in what an algorithm is – if it was worth doing for an artist to create an algorithm. Can you make an algorithm that makes images? That algorithmic thinking, where you develop certain rules, lots of artists have worked with that. You can take Sol Lewitt’s drawings, for example. How do you take a set of rules and apply them to make something really visually exciting?

I never thought I would be interested in maths, but visually, for patterns, lines, shapes, I’m sure it is all in a mathematical language. I’m sure it is the same excitement mathematicians feel about numbers. Yes, the harmony of when everything comes together and it is just right – getting to the point when it feels perfect.

How did you end up at Girton College?

It was such a brilliant time, and I am convinced that Cambridge would benefit so much if every College had an artist in residence. Set up by two alumnae, Suling Mead (1975, Economics and Ruth Whaley (1974, English), the Artist in Residence scheme at Girton supports an artist to spend a year in College. We lived in College and soaked in the fantastic atmosphere. My tapestry was my contribution to the College. It was getting close to their 150^th anniversary and I thought something quite celebratory would be a great response. It really allowed me to research tapestry-making and find a way to do it. That was my first tapestry, and now I am working on my sixth tapestry. I also worked with students, talked about motherhood because by son was three, and we had conversations with girls about career and motherhood.

Oxbridge Colleges have always been very masculine places, but in my mind Girton is always a female college. It’s not a women’s college, but it has an ethos that makes it a ‘female’ college.

It does and that is a wonderful thing to be celebrated. Going back to the tapestry, when I started to develop it, I had Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, the measure of all things, in mind. I wanted to think of a ‘Vitruvian Woman’ and a woman as a measure of things.

There is this conversation in the world of design that most things are designed by men and for men. I started looking at the square and circle, the figure, the proportions of the figure, and geometry. Then I spent quite a lot of time thinking about the female figure. I looked at a lot of etchings and engravings, because of the use of line, but it did not seemed right to use a nude female figure. In the end, I went to Russian Constructivism and represented the body through circles. Conventionally, a body is supposed to be eight heads high. I then looked at what else circles could represent.

Also, I looked up William Morris’s proportions for the tapestries of Flora and Pomona with female figures in the middle and quite a thick decorative frame around them.

It’s a slow process to meld it all together. It takes a lot of time for me to develop an image but it’s worth it to spend time with something.

You’re spending the time in thought that a weaver would have spent in the physical act of weaving?

(Laughs) Yes, that’s true.

Apart from the Girton tapestry, a lot of your other work has also focussed on women and hidden women?

The commission I did for Eddington celebrates Hertha Ayrton, who was a Girtonian. When I was working on the commission, I came across a document for street naming, etc., for Eddington, listing all the scientists with a connection to either the University or the area. I looked through every name and read all the Wikipedia data on everyone and made my own list of who seemed most interesting. When you GOOGLE Hertha Ayrton, her images come up immediately. She was doing these drawings to visualise her research. Her scientific diagrams of the electric arcs were just like abstract paintings. Even though the diagrams were black and white, she scribbled down the colours of each area in the electric arc. The connection to Girton, and her being a pioneering female scientist; it all made sense.

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You were unable to come to the opening of the show because you were doing something around nuclear sites in the UK? What was that about?

My most recent tapestries are an outcome of a year-long research project visiting decommissioned nuclear plants and learning about the nuclear industry around the UK. The project was called the The Scholar Stones Project. A scholar stone is a stone that becomes an object of contemplation. Along my travels, I found were lots of lovely stones and I can probably guess the beaches from which each stone came. I’ve also learned about nuclear power plants and their decommissioning process. The tapestries are based on the graphite cores of nuclear power plants, which are beautifully designed objects.

The first generation graphite-moderated reactors will remain in their place for at least a hundred of years, with no clear plans for their decommissioning process. So the tapestries question whether they are just sites to be overlooked or whether they are heritage sites. This idea of a tomb or mausoleum came to my mind. I looked at architectural drawings from the eighteenth and nineteenth century for mausoleums and tombs – plans and elevations.

Is it that they are going to be in the landscape for a long time and are a testament of a moment in history?

There is a conversation about how do you let the next generation know about these nuclear installations and their waste. I thought, since a tapestry tells a story, I wanted to encapsulate that story in an object which is a woven piece on the wall. It’s my way of trying to contribute to the debate or problem.

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One of the other works in the exhibition is a watercolour by Juliette Losq, called Bastion. Her work speaks about the idea of heritage; what you choose to commemorate and what you choose to let decay and forget. Heritage isn’t all about beautiful, elite structures.

Nuclear heritage is problematic and contaminated and tells a really uneasy story of scientific ethics. Wonderful minds inventing fantastic objects, and we only now understand how pernicious they are. I am quite interested in the subject personally.

At this historic time, one can’t but ask, how has the lockdown affected you?

In terms of work and family, it has been positive. It’s good to slow down and to not have commitments. I am probably more productive. Home-schooling is hard, but in terms of ideas, it’s all happening. I can still go to the studio and I’m still working. It’s just more childcare.

When I decided I really wanted to be an artist and work for myself, it was a conscious decision. You belong to yourself all the time. You just have to get on with your stuff.

Find out more about Yelena Popova at http://www.yelenapopova.co.uk/