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Moscow-based artist Maria Luneva, also known as Supinatra, defines her work as plant surrealism. Blurring the boundaries between the human and natural worlds, she manages to create art that doesn’t seem reflective of either, but another world entirely. A world that was perhaps lost to us as we grew further and further away from the natural world upon which we were once a part. Her yearning for this world, her love for flora and fauna led her to pursue art that allows her to demonstrate an intimate relationship between herself and nature.

Supinatra’s art exists somewhere at the intersection between photography, fashion, performance, and sculpture. Inspired continually by flowers, beauty, nostalgia and childhood innocence, the artist’s work imaginatively reopens a dialogue human society has seemed to incessantly disrupt. “Touching, smelling, and plucking are the most basic or, if you like, childish impulses. I just follow them!” she tells us.

Whilst her art is a construction of natural elements that she, herself, has created, she also highlights the intricate artistry of the elements she is utilising, something that occurs instinctively and organically within the natural world. She celebrates a beauty we continue to take for granted. Behold the incredible way Supinatra transforms Mother Nature into a fashion icon!

Could you start by introducing yourself and your work?
I am Supinatra, a Russian artist based in Moscow. In my creative practice I examine nature, interact with it, and create new interpretations of the plant world.
I read that as an artist you are self-taught. How do you think being self-taught has been positive for your work and creative processes?
Self-exploration makes my work more personal, perhaps original but I think that being self-taught has both advantages and disadvantages.
The relationship with nature expressed in your work is a very physically immersive one. How do you find the sensory aspect of creating your art?
Touching, smelling, and plucking are the most basic or, if you like, childish impulses. I just follow them! I am an adult but also, at heart, a child, reaching for every plant of interest.
Your 2021-2022 series Letters to a friend emulates “a feeling of sublime eternal friendship and games in nature,” exploring a universal nostalgia for childhood innocence. Why do you think we become further removed from nature as we grow older?
At some point, the brain decides that the surrounding world has been studied enough, and you can switch to higher matters. But the process of exploring something – from the natural world in its entirety to just one petal – is endless. It is a study I was lucky to resume.

You describe your most recent photo series Second Skin as “a story about an attempt to protect oneself and protect oneself from the hostility of the surrounding world with the help of additional vegetation covers, which, paradoxically, in replacing body parts, reveal its vulnerability and fragility.”  What do you think there is to say about finding strength in softness?
Gentleness can be a strength if it is about accepting yourself and the world. Softness helps you to remain to the open air, accessible to all winds, rather than building a castle of your reality, with the stone walls made of your beliefs.
Your work blends the natural with the unnatural, the alien. As a society, do you think we’ve reached a point that such an intimate relationship with nature as your work displays has become alien?
I transform the human form with the help of plants, or to be more precise, I transform the form of plants with the help of the human body. I put together two puzzles that don’t fit together in everyday life. It has always evoked and will evoke feelings of foreignness and alienness.
I also loved your other 2022 photo series Place – Night! Presenting beautiful flowers in a way that seems unfamiliar, and perhaps even frightening is such an interesting concept. What is it about such coexistent natural contraries that interests you?
This is my favourite series. In it, I found a new way to convey reality. Here, it is not the fusion of the body and the plant that distorts the usual perception, but the environment: night. It’s frightening! Darkness washes away tender feelings. In this creepy atmosphere, plants become artefacts, creatures unknown to science. Place – Night is a new way of looking at things differently.
You have also referred to yourself as a “flower maniac” because their regular appearances in your work unfortunately means you must kill them in order to feature them. Can the relationship between art and nature ever be a harmonious one? Or do you think the destruction of one or the other is inevitable when they exist so closely?
But don’t destruction and death, along with life and creation, constitute a harmonious system?

Last year your first solo exhibition Metamorphosis ran at Inkonst in Malmö (Sweden), an exhibition that reflected “the desire to turn the plant into an animal.” What do you think that barrier between the plant and the animal consists of? How did this exhibition work to break that barrier down?
The man-made barrier lies only in the human attitude to the plant and to the animal. At the exhibition, I demonstrated the similarities in the structures of the plant and animal worlds: vessels and veins, wool and tassels, skin and foliage.
Do you think about how your art makes those who view it feel? Is that important to you?
Understanding how others see my work allows me to look at myself from the outside. I’m just looking for different points of view. It’s nice to know people have seen the world through your eyes. Of course, I am very happy when my works surprise the viewers.
Have natural resources become a fundamental element of your art or do you think you will work without them?
There is nothing more than them. But jokes aside, I would [like to] start to reproduce natural objects from clay, fabric, plastic and every material I like.
Finally, something we are all eager to know, what does 2023 hold for Supinatra?
A new summertime!

Words
Becca Child

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