Behind the scenes of Ashmolean NOW with Flora Yukhnovich

So we're in the Ashmolean's Dutch and Flemish still life paintings gallery and these are actually the works that inspired your new paintings for the Ashmolean Now exhibition. Can you tell me a bit about what interested you? The flower has been a motif that's come up in my work a lot and so to walk into this room that has so many like beautifully rendered flowers that probe the symbolism of flowers. I paint normally in a very different way to these works because they're sort of worked up with these glazes and this precision but my work's much more sort of aggressive. I deal with this idea of gender, this idea of this sort of constructed ideal of this delicate femininity. Why are flower paintings something that's so appropriate for women? What is it? Is it because they're quite unpolitical? Is it because there's a relationship between women's bodies and flowers? And so that was a really interesting thing to explore. And you also looked at the monstrous feminine and you looked at horror films and how women are depicted in horror films. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Well, I grew up watching lots of horror films and I began thinking about this idea of corruption within the still life paintings and I was trying to do paintings that bloomed and paintings that decayed and I felt like the process of decay is not something that involves the human hand and it was almost difficult to have agency in the painting as a painter. It felt like it didn't work with my way of painting so I started thinking more about this idea of kind of moral decay, thinking of flowers and the idea of blooming as a girl hitting puberty and how that is a trope in horror films. This latent kind of evil coming out in films like Teeth or Raw. Learning about their bodies and understanding the power that brings out this monstrous thing. So it was interesting to me that there is just this sort of fear around women's bodies. When we first talked about the paintings here, you told me you spent about a week in Oxford coming back to the gallery daily and then you also, I think you filmed the paintings and then took the film material back to your studio, is that right? Yeah, trying to capture them was really difficult because they're so black and they've got so much reflection on because they're sort of painted with these glazes and they're highly varnished so I ended up filming them really closely and that massively affected the way that I saw them when I was back in the studio. Suddenly the things that I maybe hadn't been so aware of when I was looking at them, the little insects or little decaying edges of leaves and the sort of rot and death that's present in these paintings became much more clear and that was the bit that I then decided to explore a bit further. You visited Oxford, you filmed the works and then you went back to the studio. What came next? When I start a painting or I start a new body of work, I like to create these sort of big mood boards that helps me approach the paintings in a more intuitive way. It was a process of progressively moving away from the historical references. There were also some baked bean photos on the pinboard. I was interested in the sense of push and pull, desire and disgust that's present in the object and yeah I felt like baked beans has that feeling of something completely quite homely and delicious and quite sweet but also completely gross if it's cold. They look like kidneys, they look like little organs. It's gross. What I really like about the works is that actually there is this variety of the way that you use the paint. So there are parts that are really, really meticulously rendered and then there are parts that are a lot more abstract, that are a lot more kind of loose. It was interesting looking at the still life which don't necessarily have like a hierarchy of forms within them, how to create sort of something that would stand in as a subject and a lot of my work is about thinking about pace and about how the eye moves through parts of the painting quickly and rests in certain paintings and sort of how it's digested. And when we were hanging the paintings we were really considering that as well, weren't we? We were really considering the kind of dynamic and kind of, as you just said, kind of those stopping points. So it was interesting with the hang to think about how sort of the eye would travel through the entire body of work in a room and to think about placing ones with different dynamics next to each other to try and sort of exaggerate that I guess. Well the works are fantastic. We're so honoured and so happy that you agreed to join us on this journey. No, it's been an amazing experience. Thank you.