Dimitrina Sevova, Open Studio at Lilly Keller’s studio in Thusis, Lovers, 2025
Series of monochromatic drawings, unprocessed graphite, paintings, sediments, graphite, pigments
Dimitrina Sevova, Open Studio at Lilly Keller’s studio in Thusis
Dimitrina Sevova, Open Studio at Lilly Keller’s studio in Thusis, Lovers, 2025
Dimitrina Sevova
Friday 29 August 2025, 18:00-21:00
Obere Stallstrasse 3/4, 7430 Thusis
Conversation with the artist 18:30
The focal point of the final presentation of my two-month residency at the Lilly Keller Studio in Thusis is a series of monochromatic drawings, titled Lovers. Some are detailed and remind of scientific studies, while others are gestural and expressive. They explore the relation between figurative representation and the thread of abstraction that runs through all shades of life. They are based on observations and encounters with the natural world and refer to the alchemical metaphor of transformation as well as to symbioses between plants and insects, and other small creatures that dwell in the ever-changing summer garden and even in the studio. I take on Lilly Keller’s view of the garden as a small world in which the boundaries between art and life/nature dissolve, where the metamorphosis of living ephemera and elemental transformations reveal their interwovenness.
The drawings are made primarily with unprocessed natural graphite that I found in a small open deposit along the Nolla riverbed. I applied this raw material directly onto 300g handmade cotton paper, enabling bold, physical mark-making. Images are traced with small stones in different intensities of grey and hardness, and with soft dark flakes, producing sharp lines reminiscent of etching, and powdery textures rubbed onto the surface by hand. The drawings reflect my fascination with graphite’s crystalline structure, soft, opaque and black, yet chemically identical to the extremely hard, transparent, and brilliant diamond.
Graphite is central to the series both through its material quality and as a metaphor. Carbon, the element in graphite, is a building block of life, undergoing a continuous exchange between living organisms and inorganic forms. It is also present as cosmic dust. In the series, I reflect on the drawing activity itself, which is a form of both seeing and non-seeing, of learning and unlearning at the same time. The image is shaped not only by artistic intention, but also formed in nature, in fossilization, where typically a carbonized film, a 2D impression preserves intricate details, even cells of plants, insects, fishes and other small animals. Through graphite, I reconnect with the root of drawing from graphein, to write. A graph is also a record of data. Carbon particles play a crucial role in the preservation of data in DNA, and is widely used in industry as a perfect medium.