KSENIA MAZHEYKO
- ARTISTIC HUB MAGAZINE
- May 5
- 12 min read
Updated: May 7
MADRID, SPAIN
Heart of the World
Art as a Path to Understanding Life
Where art and science meet, a space emerges where questions grow deeper and answers become gentler. In her series At the Heart of the World, the artist invites us on an intimate journey through the body, nature, and the invisible currents of life. Her work is born from an inner dialogue between scientist and artist, where intuition and structure together build a bridge toward understanding existence. This is a story of corporeality, limits, and the quiet beauty of a heartbeat. A story of how art can become a tool for exploring life itself.
Your work embodies a unique fusion of knowledge, sensitivity and diverse interests. Could you share more about your personal and professional journey that has led you to your current artistic practice?
Both my parents are scientists. My father is a physicist, and my mother is a neurologist. When I was a child, they were both working on their ScD theses. My father was investigating states of matter, and he had so many beautiful images of micro-objects. My mother’s workplace was filled with X-ray images showing the neurological consequences of birth trauma.
When I was around eight years old, my mother asked me if I wanted to learn how to interpret X-ray images. Seriously? What eight-year-old doesn't dream about that? Well, she did not wait for my answer and immediately explained the basic principle: Nature is beautiful. If an image looks beautiful, the patient is highly likely to be healthy.
Maybe that was the beginning of my appreciation for the beauty of the world. Looking inside, asking about what is not immediately visible, and admiring the intrinsic, beautiful logic of things.
Later, as a teenager attending Fine Art School, what I mostly enjoyed (and sometimes struggled with) was construction. In academic drawing, you learn to interpret the structure of objects. Your starting point is not your impression. It is not simply how you see it. Often, it is about understanding the way things are, despite how they might appear. Teachers would ask, Where is the center of the figure? How is its weight distributed? You cannot see it directly. You need to discover the inner structure to represent it faithfully. That search for relations between parts, constructing rather than just rendering or painting, was what I enjoyed the most.
Later on, I studied Philosophy. This visual way of thinking helped me enormously when dealing with complex abstract ideas. During my first year at university, we had weekly classes on Classical Philosophy. Long sequences of Platonic arguments, I would imagine three-dimensional shapes floating around an empty space, as if visualizing the inner structure of ideas.
I can hardly recall a situation in my life where I did not ask myself: What lies inside? What sustains this or that? Is there a solid structure that makes it viable? And always, visualizing. Complex ideas are easier for me to grasp if I draw them. Looking back, I would say that my inner dialogue almost always unfolds between two voices. One voice explains. The other draws. In my mind, these two voices are a scientist and an artist. When an idea is beautiful and it can be visualized in a convincing way, they both agree. That is the moment when I feel inner peace.
In your writings, art and science are not simply intersecting. They are deeply intertwined. How do you see their relationship today, and where, in your view, does the scientific end and the artistic start?
Thank you for this wonderful question. The more I read and think about it, the more I realize that the kinship between science and art is neither imagination nor a dream. Surprisingly, scientists seem to be more open to the arts than the other way around. I am currently reading Edward O. Wilson’s "The Meaning of Human Existence." He suggests that the eternal questions about human nature, existence, and meaning, if answerable at all, will eventually require a collective effort between what he calls "science" and "humanities," which includes the fine arts.
If we approach this issue with common sense, science and art are uniquely human endeavors, and both begin with curiosity, do they not? Institutionally, of course, Science and the Arts have their own pathways, paradigms and standards. There are limits, but to me, those limits are imposed. Because if we bring together two individuals, a scientist and an artist, how different are they, really? Their motivation is very similar. They are both brave enough to go beyond, to pursue the unknown, to aim for what remains unsaid. They are like children who never believed that something labeled as impossible was truly impossible.
What sets them apart is the method. I mean, what they actually do, how they proceed with their intuition. Artists give their intuition an aesthetic form, whether it becomes a poem, a song, a painting or a film. They say to their audience, here, this is my intuition, what do you feel about it? What is your impression? Scientists design experiments, gather and analyze data. Then they go to their audience, present their findings and ask, What do you think?
But the most exciting part is what happens to the audience when they engage with a great work of art or a groundbreaking scientific discovery. Art makes us think, not only feel. Science touches our hearts, not only our minds. Both evoke a deeply integrated response, not limited to the rational or the emotional alone. That is why, to me, "art" and "science" are simply envelopes within which genuine creativity resides.
You often explore the idea of method as a key to understanding, both in art and in science. Do you follow a specific artistic method or does each piece lead you down its own path?
You are absolutely right to call method a key. Indeed, to me, method is a key. It is the way we do things. It assumes that we have a starting point and a specific aim. Simply put, method is all about what we should do, considering where we are now and what we are trying to achieve.
My artistic journey has just begun. At this stage of my project, there is nothing certain about my method. I am still searching for it. What I do have is an intuition, and I am not alone in this, since there is much discussion about it, that artistic practices may result in knowledge. There is a deep belief within me that art can be used as a tool to explore the world, and not just metaphorically. My aim is to try every imaginable way to test this belief.
Let me take a step back and share a short story. I remember one day when my father came home from his lab looking, let us say, unhappy. I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Honey, we spent almost two months preparing an experiment. Today we performed it, but the results were completely unexpected. Now we do not know how to explain them.”
That made me wonder. What if, in situations like this, artistic practices could help? What if putting scientific ideas, theoretical problems, questions, and challenges into a form like visual art could shed light on them? And not only that. What if artistic practices could themselves become a kind of experiment? What would the design of such an experiment look like, and what methods would it require to produce reliable results? But again, I have just begun. At this point, I only have questions.
With the “At the Heart of the World” series, my aim was to draw heart structures with one stroke. Like a heartbeat, every single one is meaningful. And the big question was: what strokes were needed? How strong, how fast, in what direction? I tried different ways, but the final images didn’t feel true; they lacked life. At some point, I remembered what my mom told me about Nature, which is always beautiful.I decided to follow the way of the blood inside the vessels and heart cavities, to physically feel where the blood speeds up and where slows down, how its pressure determines the form of the organ.
The most challenging of the series was the “Nautilus Heart” because I never found an image of it. I referred to several scholarly editions, but I found only a mention that Nautilus has a kind of five-chamber heart. No images. Of course, I could give up on drawing it, but it was a wonderful opportunity to experiment. So, I collected all the information I could about Nautilus – its habits, its habitat, its anatomy and physiology – and tried to feel how slow its bloodstream should be and how strong its atria should pump it. Next, I searched for a reference. It was a mulberry tree leaf, very delicate with contrasting powerful veins, and I decided to make a print of it to represent the ventricle shape. To me, the final result feels convincing. I wonder how others perceive it.
"At the Heart of the World" (2024)
In your series "At the Heart of the World," you use the heart as a symbol of life's essence to express invisible layers of existence. How did this series begin and what does that metaphorical heart mean to you?
"At the Heart of the World" is my first approach to a huge task I set for myself. This task consists of the artistic exploration of human corporality. It arose from a personal urgency to reconcile with my body. This mind-body dissociation that so many people suffer from can take diverse forms, such as dysmorphophobia, bulimia, obsession with physical appearance, or even disgust with natural bodily processes. We often fail to feel grateful to our bodies for the life they embody, for the vital energy they produce. Instead of taking care of our bodies, we struggle against them.
In my case, it is nothing dramatic. I just do not feel fully comfortable having a body that I need to feed, wash, and allow to rest. Crazy things, but true.
At some point, the idea of conducting an artistic exploration of human corporality came to me as an insight. I am a woman and a mother. As soon as I carried the body of my little one, which to me is absolute perfection and never provoked any discomfort, nothing stood in the way of metaphorically carrying my own body. I decided to reconstruct the process of ontogenesis through a long sequence of drawings.
Thomas Nagel asks, "What is it like to be a bat?" I extend the question: what is it like to be myself in the first place? Where does my subjective experience begin? The bodily dimension of subjective experience seemed the most essential, so I focused on my physical sensations. The first thing I became aware of was my heartbeat. I should mention that it was summer. In winter, perhaps, I would have felt cold instead. Who knows?
It was also an attempt to step away from all the metaphorical and cultural layers that the concept of the heart has accumulated. Sometimes we complicate things too much. Sometimes the heart simply means the heart, and it remains intriguingly beautiful and full of meaning. Pumping blood, in itself, carries immense significance for our species, for every species, and for the evolution of the biosphere. In this sense, you are right: I reveal an invisible layer that turns out to be the most literal one, yet also the most essential and often forgotten.
As E. O. Wilson once said, "Nature is simple. We just need to understand it."
To some extent, culture and civilization pretend to be more perfect or sophisticated than nature. That is both too ambitious and unreasonable.
Answering your question about what this metaphorical heart means to me, I would say it represents a moment of silence, admiration, and worship of nature.
Constantly conflicting with nature, whether by ignoring it, attempting to improve our bodies, or trying to overcome natural limits, does not necessarily benefit us.
This series is also an invitation to look back over hundreds of millions of years of evolution and recognize that our bodies are the result of the most thorough natural selection. They cannot be anything less than absolute perfection and deserve to be treated accordingly.
Art and biology, intuition and structure, black ink and empty space come together in your work with rare precision. How do you choose your medium and format and what role does limitation play in your creative expression?
Limitations, limits and even constraints are essential for growth. Every parent knows that. The only aspect that should never be limited is imagination. All other limits serve as a foundation and help us stay focused.
About a year ago, there was an extraordinary exhibition by Marc Chagall in Madrid. It captured a whole epoch he lived through and left to us as his artistic testament. I remember a tiny piece of grey cardboard with irregular edges, and a sketch made on it with charcoal, blue and orange gouache. The piece was dated to the early 1920s, the first years of Soviet Russia. It resonated so deeply with me and made me think of the power of human creativity that needs to be expressed urgently, even despite the immediate risk of death that Chagall faced every day. His extremely limited resources made his genius shine even brighter, like all living creatures on this planet, struggling to survive.
My medium follows my aim. In this phase of my research, I am formulating my hypotheses, collecting facts and contrasting ideas. Not in vain, my artworks are a kind of notes. They are key ideas I will build my future research upon. I need to be fast, adaptive, flexible, and concise. I need to test my theoretical ideas through my artworks quickly, to discard those that do not make sense. Small formats and quick techniques are not my limitations. Quite the opposite, they create the most appropriate conditions for my research.
Watercolour and ink are water-based media. They are tricky because they escape your control. But that is exactly their heuristic potential. They reveal on paper nuances of my ideas or interpretations that I am not even aware of while just thinking about them. I swear, working with limitations is exciting.
I am working on a new series now, and I have chosen a small square-shaped format. I fell in love with it while working on the heart drawings because it is so easy to give the work a turn. It came to me while creating the Turtle Heart. It looks so natural and true when viewed from the left, the right or even upside down, offering a new viewpoint every time.
You know about Karl Popper’s falsification concept, right? Roughly speaking, it is about how to check if a concept, idea or theory is right or wrong. There are two possible ways. You either verify it by collecting more and more facts that confirm. Or you falsify it, meaning that just one contradictory fact is enough to disprove the theory. Thus, the theory can be discarded, and the researcher can move on to the next hypothesis.
For me, this small square-shaped format is a tool to easily "falsify" my drawings. I turn them around, look at them from two meters away and clearly see whether they make sense.
Of course, the small format also brings me closer to the spectator. Not only because it is easy to transport. It is easy to look at them together, to communicate with them as a whole, as a context. Hopefully, my readers and spectators can follow my ideas. I am doing my best to be clear and transparent.
You mention concepts like anomaly, intuition and illogicality as gateways to new understanding.Do you believe art can ever be objective or is its true power found in subjectivity?
On the one hand, the existence of the so-called objective world, or at least our ability to perceive it, has been questioned since antiquity. We all remember Plato’s cave, Francis Bacon’s idols, and Kant’s categories of understanding. If we also consider the pace of change that defines the modern world, it seems fair to accept that even family members may inhabit different realities while sharing the same physical space.
On the other hand, the dizzying speed of change, extreme uncertainty and unprecedented challenges have made us ill in profound ways. For quite some time now, we have witnessed a shift toward subject-oriented strategies like "choose yourself," "be who you are meant to be," and similar ideas. The general notion was simple: if we cannot rely on the objective world, we must rely on ourselves.
What I sense today, however, is that the search for inner resilience is gradually giving way to something else, a movement toward community building. At the heart of this shift lies a quiet but powerful abandonment of the old division between objectivity and subjectivity. In my view, art will play a vital role in this transition. It is no coincidence that many within the art world speak of art as the new religion.
I would venture to say that art’s true strength lies in its intersubjectivity. In dialogue with art, people reveal their values, or at least become more aware of what matters most to them at a given moment in their lives. Through art, people connect with one another. They find their communities, their ideas and the principles that help them move forward. I sincerely believe that art creates landmarks and conveys meanings that may not be universal, but that reach beyond the individual life of the artist. This is the kind of art I believe in.
The titles of your works, such as "Holy Heart", "Golden Fish" or "Aigrette", often suggest a biological foundation with a spiritual tone. How do you arrive at these titles and do they guide the artwork or follow it?
What a lovely observation. I have actually never thought much about titling. Titles somehow arise during the process of working on an idea, not necessarily on a particular piece. They always come before the piece is finished.
Thinking about it now, I realize I love transparency. Following Wittgenstein’s idea that "what can be said, can be said clearly," I would like my way of thinking, as expressed in my artworks, to be clear to the viewer. To some extent, these titles are an invitation to look around, a little beyond our own subjectivity, and stop attributing meanings to things that do not belong to them.
We are becoming dangerously detached from the natural world, which we tend to see merely as an unlimited resource. We need to reconsider our attitude towards nature and learn to see it for what it truly is. To see a fish instead of food. To see a bee instead of merely an agricultural pollination tool. To open our hearts. To try not only to take, but also to give. And maybe, over time, to become more human.
Thank you.
Art and science, each in their own language, search for the same truth: what it means to be alive. Through delicate lines, heartbeats, and the silence of paper, the artist behind Heart of the World reminds us that true understanding begins when we stop fighting nature and start listening to it. Her journey remains open, humble, and honest. Perhaps in that imperfect movement lies the true power of art – in its ability to bring us back to our original rhythm. The rhythm of life.
