Virga Gallery

Biography

Since 2016, Latvian-British artist, Svetlana Atlavina (born 19xx), has developed a practice deeply engaged with lines as expressive aesthetic form, but more importantly, as the fundamental element in the formation of the connective tissue that binds us to each other and the more than human, to our environment, to memory and to materiality itself. The line has become a visual trope and a methodology for arts based research. Through this approach, she moves beyond the direct visual representation or description of these relationships to the delicate expression of fragility, presence, vulnerability, communication, faith, loss, and transformation. With each new project, Atlavina investigates how architectural space, evocative objects, physical movement, ambient sound, collective participation, and new technologies can create experiences of reflection and memory recall. Clay plays an important role in Atlavina’s practice as medium of choice to evoke memory.

Atlavina’s Lines of Reproduction, featured at Virga Gallery, is a formative body of work exploring the female condition through the many life-stage changes of childhood, puberty, and motherhood to independence. Working simultaneously in printmaking processes and with clay, Atlavina transformed the line from two dimensions to three and back again. In this work, the clay becomes expressive of the female breast, which gives life, nurtures, and loves, but also experiences trauma. Lines, which trace along the edges of the clay, both define and create a barrier for the tender organic forms that lie within and undergo a symbolic becoming.

Atlavina’s practice has been supported by significant Arts Council England research funding. She has received numerous commissions to develop participatory projects and online programmes for Fulbourn Mental Hospital in Cambridgeshire (2019-2021), Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge (2020), Cambridgeshire and Peterborough National Health Service Foundation Trust (CPFT NHS, 2020-2021), Women in Prison, South London (2019-2021), British Association of Art Therapists, and Buckinghamshire New University. Her most recent solo exhibition, Lines of Prayer (2025-2026, travelled to St Mary-at-Hill Church, Billingsgate, London; CPFT NHS Research and Resource Centre, Elizabethan House, Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge; and Cavell Centre, Peterborough.