Clay and Augmented Reality (CAR)

Clay and Augmented Reality (CAR) is a multidisciplinary project exploring how tactile clay sculpting and digital AR technologies can evoke and process personal childhood memories.

Drawing on artistic research, psychoanalysis, embodied cognition, and inspiration from both artists and literature, CAR’s outcomes are presented in digital 3D form through the Museum of My Mother and I—a publicly available platform offering an open-access archive of tactile memory objects.

The digital repository is not static; it evolves through continual revisiting and re-questioning the meaning and significance of childhood events in light of present-day perception and understanding.

CAR integrates tools such as Magic Leap, HoloLens, and ARVID to extend the sculptural experience beyond gravity-bound space. Workshops invite participants to sculpt memory fragments in clay and explore their virtual echoes through soundscapes, body movement, and augmented environments.

By merging tactile practice with immersive media, participants—encouraged by a gentle focus on positive recollection—embark on a journey through memory, emotion, and play.

The research has developed across 24 interactive sessions, public workshops, and collaborations with psychologists, psychoanalysts, and artists. These encounters offer potential frameworks for enhancing creativity and attention through collaborative art processes.

A growing digital collection of memory artefacts is available on Sketchfab, offering an evolving, open-access library of digitised tactile forms.

CAR aims to expand how we engage with the past—inviting playful, immersive reconnection with early experience and proposing new forms of memory care, creativity, and storytelling across both physical and digital realms.

Svetlana Atlavina Copyright © 2015-2025. All rights reserved.

Bridge

An international collaborative project between ArtCan (UK) and ÖSKG (Sweden)

Over the course of two years of remote artistic collaboration, two group exhibitions were held—first in Sweden, then in London. Our co-creative journey was shared through installations at Tjörnedala Konsthall, a historical building on the Baltic Sea coast (2023), and Downstairs at The Department Store in Brixton (2024).

Together with my co-artist Adrian Room (Sweden), we developed a body of work exploring the interplay between permanent and temporary elements of the environment.

In the early stages, we drew inspiration from the planetary Rossby waves and the metaphor of listening to artists’ hearts across 800 miles of distance. We worked across three mediums: clay, painting, and printmaking. Our collaborative pieces included ten sculpted ceramic hearts, abstract paintings, and long reels of hand-printed imagery, forming a visual journey.

The process of working with clay hearts led me to reflect on design, fragility, and the human heart itself—both as an anatomical object and as a symbol of emotional and ethical depth.

As I touched the newly sculpted pulmonary and aortic valves, atria, ventricles, and arteries, I began to wonder: Where does love reside? How do we each inscribe values onto the tablets of the human heart, beginning in the earliest hours of life?

This led to deeper questions about immaterial love and its tangible influence—how it courses through our bodies and shapes our societal structures, much like blood sustains the heart.

Throughout the collaboration, the physical distance between us heightened my sensitivity to communication. I became attuned to the subtle vibrations in Adrian’s voice, considering each word carefully. Even infrequent exchanges required thoughtful presence, deep listening, and trust.

This section includes a selection of images from our two-year collaboration—traces of a creative and human connection built across borders, mediums, and hearts.

The inspiration for this installation was sparked by a passage from Tim Ingold's book Lines, which explores the concept of memory and the ways in which we inhabit spaces. The quote resonated strongly is "they thought of these surfaces not as spaces to be surveyed but as regions to be inhabited, and which one can get to know not through one single, totalizing gaze, but through the laborious process of moving around." (Ingold, p.17)

This quote ignited a deep fascination with three-dimensional spaces and the potential for them to become vessels of memory and personal history. The installation is an ongoing exploration of this concept, where white elements stay for tangible aspects of life, and red wool is for the intangible and invisible nature of care throughout civilisations.

Initially, the process involved experimenting with unconventional porcelain forms, using knitting to create spacial patterns within the porcelain occupation of space.

As the project progressed, the broken pieces of ceramics and threads of wool began to take on deeper significance, representing recollections of past experiences and current events.

The installation is a work in progress, a constantly evolving tapestry of memories and brought to life through the combination of tactile materials and carefully constructed forms.

The working process reflects on our relationship to the spaces we inhabit and pass, our connections with parents, relatives and the external world, and how memory shapes our understanding of the world around us.

Distorted Bells as CDistorted Cultures

It was my discovery of a dual function for church bells that became the impetus for the collection of clay pieces. It shocked me that the sound of church bells, normally associated with a sense of solace or community, could become a siren for coming destruction, an invitation to take safe shelter below the ground.

Initially, I researched the internal mechanism for a clapper and the bell's wall. Using porcelain, I began to transform its recognisable shape into something melted, deformed, and flattened. I wanted to make artefacts incapable of creating a sound that might in some way relate to the silencing of church bells after an aerial attack.

Further research brought an unexpected turn: the porcelain fragments continue to sound even when flattened. Many are unexpectedly resonant after thermal changes.

The collection of porcelain pieces presents a multitude of distorted bells.

Perhaps values, beliefs and culture are not so easily silenced.

Svetlana Atlavina Copyright © 2015-2025. All rights reserved.

My research explores the role of women in society. After volunteering in 2019 for the Mental Health Hospital and Women after Prisons Art Workshops I had a tremendous change in the understanding of female efforts and their role in society.

Since January, I have been trying to visualize and to find textual connections for the main elements in bringing up civilizations in processes of birth and breastfeeding. I chose to work with clay and printmaking to represent the correlation between natural forms, lines and the intangible aspect of time. The applied throwing wheel techniques distinguish the sculptures unique qualities in reflection to individuality of human beings. Printmaking process chosen for the project echoes the reproduction and each men exclusive features in the same time. During my research I have been focusing on psychoanalytical side of mother-child, and on two main phases of human development - pre-symbolic and symbolic stages. During the first stage when the linguistic skills are not developed, a child lives in the pool of images of mother vital ‘food-bank’ materiality, tenderness of touches, voice and her care. This is the dominant area where I tried to find visual connections. The side visual research has been ongoing in studying natural femininity, body shapes, curves, sexuality and physiology - aspects of attraction between genders, necessities of reproduction for human race continuity, and causes for breastfeeding and further care. Working in the ceramic and printmaking studios I was thinking about my mother, and myself being a mother, in addition to the mass of mothers around the world, working hard in bringing up families. 

"... Nothing remains in the same place in which it was born: the movement of the human race is perpetual..." Seneca

The project “MMXVIII Passages” has been in development for more than  two years. Throughout my life, moving between countries has often made me wonder about people and their life journeys. The general concept is based on the fact that the mass of people moving between countries legally and illegally is equal to the 5th largest country with a population more than 244 million.

My practice explores the life and experiences of a community of immigrants in 21st century Britain, where policies and politics have changed at the age of Brexit. Post-Brexit times suddenly forced some people to feel unwelcome and as outsiders, and others welcome and at home. The project is based on research, interviews, critical and theoretical notions within ongoing debates.

Confinement

‘You Prisons - Our Cells’

The project ‘Your Prisons - Our Cells’ questions the humanity of systems, the purpose of punishment, discipline, and control. My visit to the HM Prison Reading (2016) and The Ballad of the Reading Gaol (O. Wilde) are sites for my visual response. The idea was induced by reading Discipline and Punish by Foucault, were surveillance is described as an effective disciplinary device, which assures the automatic functioning of power. The only solution is ‘Self-discipline.’ 

Video work. Click here

Review by The Revd Dr Rachel Nichols

On 22nd March 2017, I travelled to the private view of ‘Contested Space’, Svetlana Atlavina’s solo exhibition at the Chelsea Gallery. The date is significant, as this was the day that the streets of Westminster became a violently ‘contested space’, and I was conscious of this as I negotiated my way across London. Svetlana’s work in this exhibition did not focus on such exceptionally violent moments, but on the continual negotiations and small-scale contests that happen daily between pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in the streets. Although these works are about the experience of moving, they have such a compelling focus that I found that they held me in stillness before them. Her explorations of darkness, headlamps, rain and even the texture of the road draw one inwards into the experience. Both the paintings and the etchings and prints convey different aspects of this space: the paintings offering an insight into the colour and the speed of movement, the prints and etchings evoking the texture of being in contact physically with the road and the effort involved in propulsion. I was particularly captivated by the rainy darkness full of many-layered reflections in the painting ‘Speed and Rain’, and the fissures pointing to the threat of injury and alluding to a wider sense of dislocation in the carborundum print, ‘Deconstructed Space’. This exhibition was well worth the journey.

Contested Space project,

portrays the perils of traveling on foot, by car and particularly cycling in the streets of central London. The mixed media installation is inspired by cyclists’ and pedestrians’ experiences. Thus the main purpose of the show is to draw one’s attention to the existing situation within the pool of traffic.

The name, Contested Space, reflects the social situation where everyday participants of the city’s traffic compete for their personal track spaces and the shortest journey time.

Upon commencing my initial research for cycling in London, I discovered that many people know of cyclists or are cyclists themselves. Several even knew cyclists who have died on the streets of London. I began researching the dangers of cycling in London in early September 2014. In June the following year, my son’s colleague was hit on her daily cycle route to work, by a turning HGV on one of London’s notorious junctions, Bank. This personally affected my son and thus motivated to continue presenting the realities of traveling in the congested city.

The video portrays the hostile environment of the rush hours, as well as the isolation one experiences within the rush of the city’s arteries. The narrative develops from three viewpoints: pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists. There are no judgments, no conclusions, no suggestions, and no one is given moral preference.

Creating images with atmosphere of riskiness and vulnerability I used various tools such as digital media, etching, photo-etching, drypoint and oil sketches, I work with multiple layers for achieving atmosphere and depth, I would like to reach an effect of a gradual discovery of objects. Strokes with wide brush helps to show the power of movement. Through my art I would like to have a small input into road improvements and safety for cyclists on our roads.

Svetlana Atlavina Copyright © 2015-2025. All rights reserved.

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