My Personal Ndembu

Ndembu is a tribe in Zambia, members of which practice a specific ritual when all participants achieve an imaginary death and subsequent rebirth through immersion in a trance.

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As the artist walks down the room of tormenting memories, she draws strength from her feminine instinct and channels her inner unconscious onto the canvas through a rich and complex palette of colors and forms.

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A renaissance is coming through the world of unique feelings left on paper.

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Through her paintings, the viewer embarks on a journey of spiritual healing and self-discovery, guided by the thoughtful melancholy of deep blues and blacks, and the expressive anxiety of complex shades of yellow and red, accompanied by the sound of the kalimba and ritual African singing, invoking the natural principle of truth and self-knowledge.

 

Elina’s monotype technique which involves trampling the resulting image onto paper with her feet, departs from the standard process of creating a monotype. This action has a special context. The ritualistic nature of her artistic process can be compared to the African mythological rite called «Ndembu» which represents a process of rebirth.

 

The artist confronts internal pain face to face, a «mental cancerous tumor» and in an instinctive trance, Elina applies paints giving shape to troubling thoughts that haunt the soul. At the end of the first stage, she tramples the resulting image on the canvas with her feet, thereby detaching herself from the deeply felt, lived experience of the expression’s moment, closing the door to the past with a weighty key...