Marina Priyomova’s practice focuses on the power of memory and the role of the senses in bringing buried thoughts to the surface. Music and sound are particularly important to her process, acting as triggers through which fragments of memory can be reawakened. Her paintings consider recollection and erasure as interconnected processes, exploring the ways in which memories can resurface, shift and gradually fade.

With her Ukrainian heritage informing her practice, Priyomova works on burlap, a material rooted in Ukrainian agrarian culture. Associated with fertility, abundance and the natural world, burlap also carries a history of labour and utility through its traditional use as a material for carrying and storing. Its strong, coarse structure provides a physical foundation for Priyomova’s paintings, allowing the material itself to become part of their meaning and sense of history.

Priyomova’s paintings are centred on the contrasts between construction and destruction, memory and erasure, abstraction and form. Working across burlap, oil and oil plaster, she builds and disrupts her images through successive layers, creating surfaces in which figures emerge and recede. Her characteristic haze renders figures faceless and increasingly abstracted, creating a sense of anonymity that reflects the instability of memory. Pockets of sharper clarity interrupt these passages, echoing the way recollection can return in sudden, vivid fragments before once again becoming indistinct.