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About

Photo on 15-01-2025 at 14.09 #2.jpeg

I am originally Russian, living in the UK now for more than half of my life. I am based in the beautiful Warwickshire, with my two small dogs, a chinchilla, and over a hundred plants.

To start with, I don’t have any formal art training. My background is science, and I spent over a decade in academic research, in the field of molecular biology. I am forever fascinated with biology and with the natural world. The intricacy of how the living organisms are built and the beauty of the natural forms are a constant source of interest and inspiration. The life cycles and the food chains are the prototypes of the dilemmas that we, humans, face in life, and it’s something that I think about a lot.

I then had a period of working in an entirely human world, as a manager in a software engineering company. That lead me to study business and management, and then lured back into academic research, this time in social sciences. It has opened my eyes to the incredible knowledge that cannot be studied by using the scientific method - the subjective and fickle world of perception, thoughts and emotions and the resulting human behaviour.

I am not going to pretend that I know how all that, plus art, fits together, and where I am going with all this. I sometimes feel like an insect that has a faulty developmental programme - it keeps undergoing metamorphosis every few years, and can never reach its final form. The last transformation was somewhat moving away from the dolls and into illustration. Well, as they say - trust the process.

My dolls are inspired by magical stories, folklore and animated films, and are sometimes a bit of a caricature on the world of academia. My watercolour doodles are inspired by the natural world and by folk art. I am also very drawn to all things antique. I think it comes from my fascination as a child with my grandparents’s old photo albums, old textiles and furniture, books, and a stash of women’s craft magazines. With all the forced movement, anything that pre-dated the communist revolution in Russia was a rare treasure. The faded colours, the smell - it was like travelling into a different world, and I think I try to add a part of that world into my creations.

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sonya.vengrova[at]gmail.com

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© 2024 by Sonya Vengrova

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