Hades bow is a woman of words. Many words in magazines that are meticulously typed and printed at the end of each year are filed in boxes and stored in its library with its capacity for 6000 books. Some of these words appeared in her recent London solo show, We’re All Just Passing Through, as part of her Confessions series. “I catch myself mourning the present as if it were already a memory”; “The things you love are the things you’ll miss” were enlarged and recreated in acrylic polymer and fiberglass to resemble crumpled pieces of paper. After all, Hades is a poet, so the words come naturally.
However, she is not someone who takes words for granted. Born in Russia, she left St Petersburg for England as a child after her father was murdered. Initially unable to speak English, she existed in a world of silence. It was at this formative moment in her life that she truly understood how vital language is to connection and belonging.
Whether poetry or visual art, its ultimate goal is the same: to connect. However, the transition from poetry to visual art was not a move she had anticipated, until the pandemic, when she was faced with a canceled book tour. In 2021, she collaborated with her friend, the musician RAC, to return her fourth volume of poetry. Arcadiain an NFT. “We all have bills to pay”, she said about the cooperation.
The move was not unprecedented; they had success with an NFT postcard a few months earlier, with a handwritten poem by Arch, which sold for $71,410.76 at auction. But that was just a warm-up. Arcadia sold on a November evening at Christie’s in the form of a 9-minute, 48-second abstract animation accompanied by ASMR-style electronic music for $525,000. It became “the first collaborative interdisciplinary fine art NFT to come to auction,” as the press release stated, and made Hades the highest-paid poet in the world.
After such a crescendo, there is inevitably a pause. What next? With her earnings, she decided to buy a house in the British countryside from which to think about her next move. What eventually led him to trade pen for brush, however, were a series of personal betrayals by four different people in succession. “I was very, very overwhelmed and I had to find another way to express everything I was feeling inside,” she told the Observer.
Her therapist suggested she try a creative path without the pressure to succeed. Hades recalled enjoying doing art for GCSE. However, her perfectionist tendencies would not rest. Instead of treating painting as a casual hobby, she set out to teach herself the craft: experimenting with brushes, palette knives, gesso, mediums and varnish to understand the effects each could create. Her main source of education? YouTube. After a year of steady practice, “the paintings started coming out.” It might have remained a hobby if her friend, a prominent art collector, had not insisted on buying one of her works and encouraged her to take her work more seriously.
The paintings in question remind Edvard Munchwith solitary figures in front of large bodies of
Hades openly acknowledges the influence of other artists on her visual language. “I’ve never had an original thought in my life,” she said half-jokingly. Hades understands that she is a product of what she consumes, but also has the power to give her perspective, to infuse it with new energy, to become part of the conversation. She looks at what came before her to reinterpret and build on that work, remaking it in her own language. But she’s also just as likely to use images from her everyday life, whether it’s killing crows she befriended on her local beach, a photo of a discarded suitcase she picked up in London or a group of cloaked figures she found online.
In terms of colour, a very distinct and controlled range is evident: black, chrome, grey, red, white and the odd shade of yellow. There’s almost a gothic sensibility to the works, a bleak, bronde worldview. “I never really felt like a kid, so I was never drawn to bright colors,” she said. If anything, they highlight her meditation on existentialism, loneliness and the human condition.
Taking her artistic background is exactly what Venice can expect in her debut, The Return, which opens May 7 at Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia (a decommissioned church on the Grand Canal). Hades was inspired by Gustav KlimtThe faculty’s long-lost paintings and her site-specific work, spanning 22 panels and spanning 13 metres, will depict 63 life-size figures, single yet joined together, as they head towards an abyss at the center of the composition. In the figures, which pay homage to Greco-Roman sculpture, are all kinds of human experiences and emotions.
“There are so few times in an artist’s life when you get the chance to really go big,” she said. “Venice is such a beautiful place that I adore. I wanted to do something very special for it.” The work will be installed in a decommissioned church, a setting she felt naturally lends itself to themes of life, death and transcendence. “What’s more appropriate than those themes in a space like that? I knew I wanted something dramatic—something worthy of Venice.”
In addition to “The Return”, she will present Sphinxa comprehensive sculptural installation, as well as new works from her ongoing series Confessions. The sentiment running through the latter is one she often returns to: vulnerability is inseparable from connection. Or as Hades himself said, “vulnerability is the price you pay for connection.”
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