Rust in time is a personal body of work about Alena’s family home in Ivanovka, a small village in Donbas, Eastern Ukraine, that has become a military base. In Summer 2021 despite the restricted borders, she managed to visit her parents' home. It felt strange—a moment of great stillness along with arresting hopelessness, and she was particularly struck by the many rusted objects lying around which signaled the area’s industrial past.
The rusted objects presented here were collected in Scotland—at the seashore, Edinburgh streets, friend’s gardens, and hidden scrape yards. For Alena these objects began to form an emotional link between her two homes, helping her to cope as the situation began to rapidly worsen in Ukraine.
Finally, Alena painted on layers of latex, a liquid rubber which is then peeled carefully off, providing her with moments of deep emotional relief. The latex for her is a bandage, helping to heal and support both the work and the artist, as she moves forward with the pain.
Biography
Alena Rogozhkina is an artist who loves experimenting with colour and texture whilst bringing conflicting, often recycled, materials together to discover their unfulfilled potential. She works with a range of media including sculpture, photography, painting, moving image and printmaking. Alena strongly believes in art as a powerful tool that we can use to drive social change, rebuild trust, and infuse optimism into our communities. After completing two years of Contemporary Art Practice and one year of the Printmaking Course at Leith School of Art, Alena plans to build upon her practice independently in her new studio.
