Tracing paths of nuclear disasters, chemical fallout and conflict with Stanislava Pinchuk

YVETTE DAL POZZO: Your work Moon (Kharkov). in the exhibition Earth/Sky depicts the Ukrainian city where you were born and raised. Why have you chosen to map familiar places and personal experiences within the form of a moon?

MISO: At the time, I was travelling a lot. Pretty much non-stop, working, with a very small bag in tow. That’s still my life, but I’m very used to it now. But during this time, I always moved with the moon, measuring time and timelines by its phases. The moon made everything human, and I’d check in every night and stare for a while — it was universal and the only constant.

Moon (Kharkov). appears deceptively restrained and meditative, where in fact it is a chaotic and lively culmination of city maps and personal memories. How did you collate, transpose and reduce these complex images into one coherent work?

It’s so interesting to talk about this drawing now. This was made five years ago, on the eve of the Ukrainian Civil War. That was a huge rupture. Everything really changed after that for me, like a fire. So, I’ve always felt this work to be the transitional drawing in my practice. It’s where I went from mapping myself to mapping a bigger political picture.

From there, my work became a data-mapping practice of the changing topographies of war and conflict zones. The question became not just how I experience something, but how does a city and a landscape contain memory and testament to an event? How is the ground changed by political catalyst? How does topography bear scars? So, my approach to distilling complex information and chaos in this work, and visualising it clearly and cleanly, really set the template for everything after.

I expand, throw everything out on the table, and look at it all. Then, I begin to trim — to see what stays, and what shows itself to be the core. Time and play resolve everything organically. Even in a deeply research and data driven process. It’s a funny paradox.

Why do you think artists have continually explored humankind in relation to the vastness of the universe?

Art, storytelling, theatre, costuming, music … in all their forms, have always played a large part in the way we dream and the way we understand ideas bigger than ourselves. So, I think to look at the expansive and unknowable blue and black above us, that informs our lives so much. It is easy to see why it’s been such a constant source of inspiration and mythology across all time and culture. It is one of those curious things, that the more we seem to know about it, in an age of astrophysics — the more questions it brings too.

In your tattoo practice, you continually work with images of air, sky, constellations and stars. Can you tell us more about your continued fascination with celestial realms?

Like in the Moon work, I love plotting the invisible maps that the body makes as it goes through space and making them real. So especially with tattooing, I love mapping those journeys that the body makes back onto itself.

I find it interesting to map journeys that are tied to specific geographic points and biological details, but that also visually exist in a bigger allegory drawn in the weightlessness of space. One moment can be untied a little and fit into a wider idea of exploration and dreaming — and can carry a timeliness and timelessness at once. On a practical level, I think it allows the wearer to retain something personal, without having to always explain it to outsiders seeing the tattoo. An outside eye can still make sense of it on one level, without a second meaning having to reveal itself, if it doesn’t want to.

Since the creation of Moon (Kharkov)., you have worked in the Chernobyl and Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zones, as well as the Ukraine. What is the importance of portraying current disaster and conflict zones?

I never expected to see war in my home, in my lifetime. The first works I made, mapping Ukraine, I made very quickly and instinctively. I was overwhelmed. Probably angry. I don’t think I had a night off for six months, at least. So, in a way, I didn’t fully realise what I’d made until I finished. But suddenly I had these new methodologies and tech in place, with a lot of potential and inspiration springing from them. More importantly, there was also a new kind of research question there, on data-mapping land and memory, that I didn’t feel anyone was working with in the same way.

From there, it made me assess a lot of autobiographical experiences of conflict in a new way. From growing up in Ukraine in the wake of Chernobyl, to living in Tokyo at the time of Fukushima, to looking at immigration embedded into the landscape via Calais, and now I’m thinking about global environmental concerns in my current work — data tracking the chemical fallout of the oil fires set by ISIS in the Qayyarah region south of Mosul, Iraq.

So that’s the long way to say — yes, to work with current conflict feels important! Partly because it’s autobiographical, but also because I’m interested in the idea of art as a social practice. I’m interested in art that exists outside of museums or has a wider application or is intersectional, braiding disciplines and ways of seeing.

Earth/Sky is on display at the National Gallery 6 Oct 2018 — 7 Apr 2019.