As Venice Nears, Arch Hades Traces Her Shift from Verse to Visuals
Arch Hades is a woman of words. Many words in journals that are scrupulously typed and printed out at the end of each year, filed away in boxes and stored in her library with its capacity for 6,000 books. Some of these words were on display in her recent solo show in London, “We’re All Just Passing Through,” as part of her Confessions series. “I catch myself mourning the present like it’s already a memory”; “the things you love are the things you’ll miss” were enlarged and recreated on acrylic polymer and fiberglass to resemble crumpled pieces of paper. After all, Hades is a poet, so words come naturally.
She is not someone who takes words for granted, though. Born in Russia, she fled 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.
Be it poetry or visual art, her end goal is the same: to connect. However, moving from poetry to visual art was not a move she had anticipated, not until the pandemic, when faced with a canceled book tour. In 2021, she collaborated with her friend, the musician RAC, to convert her fourth poetry volume, Arcadia, into an NFT. “We all have bills to pay,” she has said of the collaboration.
The move was not unprecedented; they’d had success with an NFT of a postcard a few months prior, featuring 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 nine-minute, 48-second-long abstract animation, soundtracked with ASMR-esque electronic music for $525,000. It became “the first collaborative interdisciplinary fine art NFT to come to auction,” as the press release put it, and made Hades the world’s highest-paid poet.
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 contemplate her next move. What ultimately made her swap the pen for the paintbrush, however, was a series of personal betrayals from four different people in quick succession. “I was just very, very overwhelmed, and I had to find a different way to express everything I was feeling inside,” she told Observer.
Her therapist suggested that she try a creative outlet without the pressure to succeed. Hades remembered enjoying doing art for GCSEs. Yet her perfectionist tendency wouldn’t rest. Instead of treating painting as a casual hobby, she set about teaching 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, hadn’t insisted upon buying one of her works and urged her to take her work more seriously.
The paintings in question recall Edvard Munch, with 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 that she also has the power to give her perspective, to inject it with new energy, to become part of the conversation. She looks to what came before her to reinterpret and build upon that work, remaking it in her own language. But she is also just as likely to use images from her everyday life, whether it’s the murder of crows she befriended at her local beach, a picture of a discarded suitcase she took in London or a group of cloaked figures she found on the internet.
In terms of color, a very distinct and controlled palette is evident: black, chrome, grey, red, white and the odd hint of yellow. There’s almost a Gothic sensibility to the works, a somber, Brontë-esque worldview. “I’ve never really felt like a child, so I’ve never really been drawn to bright colors,” she said. If anything, they emphasize her meditation on existentialism, loneliness and the human condition.
Her seizing of artistic lineage is exactly what Venice can expect at her debut, “Return,” which opens on May 7 in the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia (a decommissioned church on the Grand Canal). Hades was inspired by Gustav Klimt’s long-lost Faculty Paintings, and her site-specific work, spanning 22 panels and stretching 13 meters, will depict 63 life-sized figures, at once solitary yet merging into one another as they are beckoned towards an abyss at the center of the composition. In the figures, which pay homage to Greco-Roman sculpture, are all sorts of human experiences and emotions.
“There are so few times in an artist’s life when you get an opportunity 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 suited to themes of life, death and transcendence. “What is more fitting than those themes in a space like that? I knew I wanted something dramatic—something worthy of Venice.”
Alongside “Return,” she will present Sphinx, an immersive sculptural installation, as well as new works from her ongoing Confessions series. The sentiment that runs through the latter is one she often returns to: vulnerability is inseparable from connection. Or as Hades herself put it, “vulnerability is the price you pay for connection.”
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