Before the pour

The photographs were taken several years before the pandemic. At the time, I was living in Saint Petersburg and visiting Rostov-on-Don. I contacted a local modelling agency, showed them my work and asked whether I could photograph some of their models. They agreed, and a group of models arrived for the shoot.

The resulting images were controlled, flattering portraits. My understanding of portrait photography was strongly tied to the task of finding the angle, pose and expression that made a person look beautiful. Some photographs entered an earlier series and were circulated by the agency. Others remained in my archive.

Return through material

My relationship with photography had changed considerably by the beginning of lockdown. After moving to Britain, I had passed from behind the camera to the position of the model. Modelling, followed by work within the adult industry, absorbed my attention for a period of roughly a year and a half. By early 2020, that experience had begun to lose its energy for me. I felt tired of it and increasingly uncomfortable with how much of myself I had exposed.

The experience was also too recent to become the subject of my art. Liquid acrylic offered another route back to making. I could work through physical action without immediately explaining or publicly revisiting what had happened before.

During lockdown, I poured acrylic onto photographs from different periods of my archive. I altered the proportions of paint, pouring medium and water, producing markedly different results each time. Gravity, viscosity and the surface of the print determined how the material spread. I could influence its movement but could never fully determine the final image.

The repetitive pouring functioned almost like a private form of art therapy. It was also intensely pleasurable. Liquid acrylic produces beauty with suspicious generosity. Once the mixture is right, the material performs much of the composition itself. Watching it spread gave me the immediate rush of a match on a dating app or an online purchase. I placed the technique among my guilty pleasures because it seemed too enjoyable, too decorative and too capable of producing attractive results without suffering.

Mycophobia

The works selected for Mycophobia use small, glossy portraits and relatively restricted palettes. Their scale allowed me to work serially, discard unsuccessful results and continue until the acrylic settled in a compelling way.

Parts of the models remain visible: an eye, a shoulder, a hairstyle or the outline of a carefully arranged pose. The poured material behaves like another body. It swells, separates and forms membranes, cavities and cell-like structures across the photographic surface.

I made these works before I had a coherent concept for them. The fungal and viral reading developed afterwards, during lockdown, through conversations with my friend Anastasia and a text I commissioned from her. She described the portraits as being overtaken by mushrooms, spores, mildew and organisms growing beneath a surface. At that historical moment, these images felt inseparable from a daily reality saturated with invisible transmission, contamination and uncontrolled biological growth.

Delegating the voice

Once I had produced a substantial body of acrylic works, I began commissioning writers, critics and translators. I hoped that an articulate writer could provide the intellectual structure and artistic legitimacy that I did not yet know how to claim for myself. Anastasia’s text for Mycophobia belongs to this period.

The commissioned texts gave the work language, but they could not replace my own relationship with what I had made. This became an important lesson in my practice. For me, speaking and establishing connections between an experience, an image and its public form are part of the artistic work.

I preserve Anastasia’s text as a historical response rather than a final explanation. It records how the series was framed at the time, while this page restores the chronology of its production and my present position within it.

The works shown here form a historical selection from a much larger and still unresolved liquid-acrylic archive. They preserve the moment when I returned to art through material pleasure and began to understand that making an image, commissioning its interpretation and speaking as its author were three different acts. Much of my later practice grew from learning to hold those acts together.

Original commissioned text

Text by Anastasia, commissioned in 2020. Reproduced with Marina’s first name corrected; the wording is otherwise unchanged.

Filthy, slithery, slippery. Rampant, feverish, famished. They are feeding on flesh remains. They are vigorously growing under the surface. They are obscenely exposing their private parts. Their spores are stealthily carried by the wind, unseen and unheard. Mushrooms, mildew and mould are omnipresent and omnipotent. There is nothing they cannot desecrate. Their bodies are devouring this thing that we call culture.

The project «Mycophobia» by Marina Smith is a little bit of a phantasm, a little bit of a mimesis. The photographic paper of a small format contains laconic female portraits. These girls are models with impeccable appearance. They are radiating juvenility and purity. Their facial expressions have almost nothing to say. Marina took these photographs several years ago. These portraits are beautiful but dead. Marina decided to bring them back to life.

She is blending paints in a glass; she is pouring them onto the glossy surface. Acryl clots are spreading on the photographic paper. They are shimmering disturbingly and throbbing with a viscous texture. Marina is washing out the colours and their outlines. The layers are flourishing with lead and quicksilver, gaping in cobalt and copper, bleeding with crimson and oozing black. Some of them are breaking down into sickening pink, intoxicating indigo, and suffocating whitish.

A new life is being born in these odd patterns. The girls are still there, in the photos. But they have been taken over by a fungus-like mass. Pondering over the Buddha’s death, John Cage wrote: «The function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death». Fungus-like acryl stains are cleansing Marina’s archive photos of gloss, inanity, and emptiness. Artificial mould is revealing the mechanics of time. Marina is outrunning the decay by taking on the work of fungi.

The putrefaction temporarily steps aside, standing still in front of a fake. Death is renewed with life, order takes the place of chaos, and civilisation is absorbed by nature. Everything carries on as usual. Life, which is changeable, unpredictable, irrepressible, repellent, eerie, and hideous, triumphs. Acryl fungi are a part of this life. They sprang from the same impulse that the real ones emerge from. Mycophobia is a descent into life.

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