Dasha Surma’s artworks are all about making magic out of the mundane

Dasha Surma’s pencil drawings look like painterly impressions of the photographs you might take on holiday. In a place where everything is unfamiliar and, with a newly naive perspective, you are able to notice something beautiful in the smallest of things. Populated by everyday glimpses – light pouring through the branches of a tree above, or eggs perched carefully on a market stool – the artist’s illustrations are fragments from her travels and walks. “My drawings are the result of changing my angle or point of view on the world,” says Dasha. “They are also an effort to greet things whether they are remarkable or not.”

Based in Saint Petersburg, the freelance illustrator spends her time as part of a cross-disciplinary collective for branding and creative direction — AW Studios, as well as working for illustration agencies such as Bang!Bang Studio and Lunatum. In her commercial practice, Dasha mostly works with magazines, cultural institutions and local initiatives, “especially eco-conscious practices”. Similarly, in her personal work the artist is concerned about forming a connection to the natural world through the act of drawing.

“Drawing is the way to get over this prehistoric destructive instinct, and to be attentive to nature and others, to act with respect and curiosity towards them”, Dasha says. “Living inside social and cultural catastrophe spotlighted for me, subjects such as memory and questions like: ‘what led us here?’, and the alienation or separation of people.”

Her latest series, Meeting with Others (recently displayed in a solo show at Golgol’s public library in St Petersburg) is a homage to Finnish artist Annette Arlander’s project: Meeting Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees. Dasha took influence from the pioneering Finnish performance artists’ counterargument to the common expression ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’, in which Arlander instead studied a series of natural sites in detail, much like the soft, tonal and considered work of Dasha.